This 1960 Chevrolet advertising short isn’t exactly a new find, but I never get tired of watching it do some of the similar tortures I put my Corvair through. And if six minutes is too little of extolling the many qualities of rear-engined cars, make sure you check out the amazing (but 30 minutes) of the multi-part Tatra 603 movie, the first part starting here.
The Corvair Struts Its Stuff: Handling, Offroading, River Fording, Braking, And Crash Tests
– Posted on August 16, 2011
Times sure have changed, driving through rivers and mowing down grass in fallow fields doesn’t rate highly on my car purchasing criteria. Although the car more-or-less took it, I don’t think I’d want to be in that Corvair that rolled over. Did the 1960 models have seatbelts?
On the other hand, I’d like to see that commercial re-shot with a Chevy Volt.
@DougD: I had the exact same thought about re-shooting this commercial with the Volt. Somehow I don’t imagine it will end the same way. And not because I dislike the Volt, but even the regular cars 50 years ago had much higher clearance than the cars of today.
I can’t imagine that someone from GM corporate would agree to drive a Volt 20 miles up a creek bed, either. Can you imagine the flack they would have to take after showing a commercial like that now? And the lawsuits when the cars (rightly) expire after trying some of those stunts? Woo hoo!
I love these old commercials, and the ones from the 50’s are particularly interesting. Repeatedly they show cars on two tracks or dirt roads, which apparently back then was still a large proportion of the roads. I haven’t heard the statistic lately, but when I moved to Michigan in 1998, the state (I think) released a figure that something like 5% of Michigan’s roads were still dirt or two tracks.
The other thing that gets me about the old commercials is the background music. I swear I’ve heard the same music in the background of the Mutual of Omaha’s Wild Kingdom and the Wonderful World of Disney nature shows.
Growing up in the 70’s, my father and I hunted a lot, we too spent a lot of time on dirt roads getting back to our favorite spots. Oddly enough, we did not need a Hummer with the Baja survival package, we did it our every day Mercury. A little common sense and sometimes a longer walk when conditions were wet, but we never got the car stuck or high centered.
Corvairs definitely do not have high ground clearance. I have a ’64 Corvair coupe and it is amazing how low the car is. It is impossible to find it among pickups and SUV’s in a parking lot today.
I think the reason the Corvair survived the river test is that all the electrical components are on the upper side of the engine, which is sealed to the body by a rubber gasket (in order to keep the hot air being exhausted from the cooling system from being drawn back in), and the air intake is high (on the decklid) and away from the splashing water.
@Magyar: My definition of ground clearance is the distance of the lowest part of the car to the ground. 50 years ago, cars did not have the under bumper spoiler or air dam like cars do today. Any standard car today driven in a meadow would more than likely rip off that under bumper air dam in the first 50 feet. I’ve come close to doing so on those concrete parking lot dividers with my Cavalier. How tall are those things? 6″ to 8″ maybe?
And besides, I can’t find any car next to today’s pickup trucks and SUVs in a given parking lot. What I really dislike is coming out from the store to see that one or both sides of your spot is occupied by one of these Percherons…
Paul, can you list all of the cars you have owned on one page? Just want to see how your purchases have evolved over the years. In reading your entries, your obsession with motorcars, especially GM’s has gone far beyond my wildest dreams as a fellow car lover during my youth.
That would be a sneak preview of my Auto-Biography series, which I’m updating and reprising here. Next chapter is up this Thursday. If you must, you can find the original version here:
http://www.thetruthaboutcars.com/category/editorials/auto-biography/page/6/
i’m i jumping the gun by pointing out this corvair vs. mustang slideshow from ’65?
Cool video thanks for posting it. A lot of it looks like something you’d see in a Jeep or Scout commercial. I like the spot where they show the break over on the banked curve and they get it on 3 wheels The roll over performance was pretty impressive too with the passenger side door and trunk still opening and closing.
Seems to hold up to gentle abuse ok though its not any more capable off road tham my59 Hillman untill it hits wet mud then the Corvair shows an advantage, Hardly a torture test. Structurally it held up when rolled ok but why wasnt it driven away my Gazelle was still mobile after such an event in fact it was still roadworthy I got ordered off the road subject to an infpection due to panel damage and the car passed, Nice movie got any more?
I love the slalom test, where you can see the car sliding around on the loose gravel. Wouldn’t exactly reassure me of the car’s handling.
And the ‘composure under braking’ segment, where it does a 180… what on earth?
I suspect the off-road section would be eminently achievable on any car with the right tyres.
Roadholding is the ability for a car to maintain traction during hard cornering.
Handling OTOH is the ability to keep control once traction is lost ie sliding on opposite lock something American cars are very poor at
My favorite part was when we are told how Chevrolet’s testers tried and tried to get it to roll over but couldn’t. In his book “On A Clear Day You Can See General Motors”, John DeLorean recounts that one of Chevy’s engineers flipped an early test mule on its first time out, and that the car’s instability caused massive arguments during development.
Yeah that bit didnt ring true at all
It’s funny that they’d advertise its off-road ability, given that it’s a sedan. Same with the Tatra too. Today there would be complain of promoting irresponsible driving! Swerving on the freeway? THey got away with it too! In a communist state no less! How likely is that? Try doing that that in the supposedly “land of the free”, you’ll be trhrown in jail for sure!
How come all the Corvair’s ‘testing’ failed to uncover its ‘unsafe at any speed’ handling? From the post above it looks like GM know full well of this, but decided to ignore it (probably cost too much to fix). Shameful how they promote the Corvair’s highway stability in the ad!
The story of the Corvair’s tricky handling, as I’ve seen it explained, is that GM engineers were aware that the rear-engine, swing-axle design could cause problems, many of which could be rectified by a rear anti-sway bar which would make the car more forgiving, but that the minimal extra cost of the bar was seen as a problem, so it was omitted. That meant that owners had to pay close attention to rear tire pressure recommendations to give the car somewhat conventional handling, and many if not most owners failed to do so, leaving them vulnerable to serious consequences for even a minor mistake. The bar was finally added in 1964, and then the suspension was completely redesigned for 1965–but of course the damage was done by then.
The Corvair to me is GM in a nutshell–engineering innovation, perhaps possible only at GM, undone by bean-counting and half-assing that is also perhaps possible only at GM. It’s likely that GM will never again have the resources to even shoot for something as ambitiously different as the Corvair, which is a shame.
The offroad segments were designed to highlight the superior traction of the rear-mounted engine. One of the selling points of the VW Beetle was the superior traction inherent in having the engine mounted over the driving wheels. I seriously doubt that either a Falcon or a Valiant would have been able to make it through the muddy, uphill sections of that test drive.
The highway stability test was probably designed to highlight the Corvair’s ability to resist crosswinds and buffeting by larger, passing vehicles (largely tractor trailers at that time) as much as anything else.
This was a sore point with VW Beetles – they were slower than most traffic (remember that 70-80 mph speeds were not uncommon on many highways even then) and were prone to being buffeted by crosswinds and passing traffic. This test may have been designed to ease customer fears about this problem, given that they may have associated it with a rear-engine configuration (a fact that Ford and Chrysler were happy to promote, given the conventional layouts of the Falcon and Valiant).
When talking about the handling quirks, it’s important to remember that VWs were not exactly paragons of safety in this matter, and both Porsche and Mercedes used a swing-axle rear suspension that could be tricky under certain circumstances, too. GM tried to mask this problem by recommending very specific tire pressures for the Corvair that were lower than normal for American cars at that time.
This approach ran into two problems. One, it assumed that Corvair drivers paid attention to tire pressure. Many Corvair drivers, however, assumed that it could be treated just like a regular Chevrolet – namely, it would need little maintenance and would be very “forgiving” of any owner lapses in that regard.
And, two, many service personnel, on measuring the lower pressure, would fill the tire with air. Remember that, in the 1960s, most gasoline stations were still of the full-service variety, where an attendant would pump your gas, check your oil and check your tire pressure (and fill up the tires if they were low). The self-service convenience store model was still far into the future.
GM probably looked at the handling quirks of the imports of that time, and compared the Corvair to those cars. It’s interesting to note that subsequent tests by both the federal government and independent testers essentially cleared the car on this count.
The stabilizer bar was not included for cost reasons, primarily because the Corvair was already turning out to be an expensive car to develop and build. GM did not want to the car to be too expensive compared to the Falcon. A $100 price differential may not seem like a big deal today, but it was in 1960, especially in this market segment.
The Corvair was initially a flop compared to the Falcon. The Falcon sold more than the Corvair and the Valiant combined. For a Ford to decisively beat a comparable Chevrolet by that margin was quite galling to GM management.
What saved the Corvair was the debut of the sportier Monza coupe variant late in the 1960 model year. That car was unexpectedly popular, and was the inspiration for the original Mustang. It also showed the direction GM should have taken with the Corvair – not casting it as an inexpensive, plain-jane economy car, but selling it as a more upscale car for people who wanted something small and sporty.
It’s easy to criticize GM in retrospect, but, in many ways, its fears about the car regarding costs were proven correct. The Corvair simply got slaughtered by the cheaper, more conventional Falcon in the sales race until Chevrolet stumbled upon the Monza coupe. If it hadn’t been for the Monza line, Corvair sales would likely have remained lackluster, and I doubt that the car would have survived beyond the 1963 model year.
Much better explanation than mine–thanks!
geeber:
Excellent expose on the tires and the Corvair in general!
My personal theory is that if more drivers had maintained the F15/R26psi split tire pressure, the incidence of sudden “snap” steer and rollovers would have been much lower.
Would a willingness by stubborn “don’t tell me where to set my tires” Americans to concede and maintain that difference, at least 10psi, itself have saved the Corvair?
One thing the Falcon failed at was any off highway durability it was so poorly designed they fell to pieces maybe Chevrolet should have sold the Corvair in Aussie where dirt roads were the norm, VW built cars there and in mud are quite useful being rear engined If GM could have proved the Corvairs engine reliability in that market it may have succeeded. VWs mechanical fragility was its biggest problem.
Good point about the early Falcons — when the Falcon was first sold in Australia, it was an exact copy of the North American car. Ford quickly found that the cars fell apart under Australian road conditions. They went back to the drawing board and substantially beefed up the chassis and suspension of the Aussie Falcons. Most importantly, they acted quickly and thereby preserved customer goodwill.
Actually early Falcon sales were very poor due to the durability problems it took Ford till 65 to start selling Interestingly Ford Australia did not want Falcons they wanted to modify the Zephyr but Dearborn and Dagenham said NO so the Falcon factory was a consolation prize Ford never expected the car to go to OZ and didnt engineer it to survive that sort of use Basicly Ford OZ used Failane/Mustang components to beef up the front end and strengthened the body and it worked eventually the customers returned. The Mustang while sharing a lot of Falcon architecture is more compact Fairlane than Falcon.
Would I be gauche to say, I don’t believe most of that video?
The rollover segment, in particular. Given what we now know about roof rigidity in cars of that era, I’d have expected the roof, if not specially reinforced, to be mashed flat.
Likewise, the off-road stretch. What wasn’t shown was the GM Promotional department marking out a route where there wasn’t anything sticking higher up than, say, four inches or so. Or, how many Corvairs they ran through there that nailed a stump or punctured a bias-ply tire…or just impaled the gas tank or oil pan.
Nice catch, though.
Yeah it is a bit “Hollywood” thats why I labelled it gentle Abuse Ive been in several rollover crashes in old cars even a 36 Chev and its surprising how tough a lot of old cars are
My 60 Singer Gazelle was rolled twice two seperate accidents and survived intact not even a broken window, pre cad cars were massively over built especially unit constructed cars,
BOF built isnt anywhere near as strong as the chassis is designed to carry the body the body doesnt need the extra strength