The Willys Aero CC got me thinking (again) about the Chevy Cadet, and how close it came to production. In a GM Deathwatch I wrote at TTAC, I even made the bold claim that GM’s decision to kill the Cadet was their very first Deadly Sin:
In 1947, GM killed its Cadet small car program, after spending millions on development. In response to surveys showing that urban Americans wanted smaller, less expensive and more efficient and functional cars, GM set out to create the definitive modern small car. GM’s Financial Operating Committee, based in New York, refused to authorize the funds to put the Cadet in production. They feared the program wouldn’t provide the automaker’s [then] customary 30 percent return on investment.
On this day sixty years ago, GM began to die. The whole premise of its success was based on the ever-more rationalized manufacture of full-sized cars (and trucks). When GM refused to accept a less than full–sized profit on a small car, it sealed its future. To this day (02/26/2008), GM (North America) has never had a successful, profitable small car program.
Strong words, but lets take a quick look at what could have been the most advanced small car on the planet.
Hemmingsblog has a reprint of noted historian Karl Ludvigsen’s article from 1974 here, and it makes for fascinating reading. The brilliant engineer Earl MacPherson headed up a development team, and started without any preconceived notions. It was to be a compact and light (2200 lbs) sedan to seat four comfortably, and the solutions to achieving that end were remarkable.
It was the first application of MacPherson’s famed struts, but in both front and rear suspensions, which were fully independent. Interestingly, MacPherson rejected front wheel drive, and came up with a solution to maximize interior space without resorting to it. He placed the three-speed manual transmission under the front seat, and connected it to the engine and rear differential with rigid tubes. It was a clear foreshadowing of the 1961 Tempest’s solution, and one that is still in use among certain vaunted performance cars (Corvette, Ferrari).
A modern OHV six with 133 cubic inch displacement (2.1 L) made sixty-five horsepower and gave the Cadet snappy performance and a top cruising speed of 70 mph, which for 1945 was excellent for a small car. The four wheel long-travel independent suspension gave it handling better than any GM car, and a superb ride too.
Perhaps the one aspect that seems like a bit of a questionable choice was MacPherson’s decision to use tiny 12″ wheels and tires, in order to get a decent turning radius while keeping the front wheels faired-in, a styling gimmick of the time. That also mandated very small brakes.
The Cadet was to be sold for $1000. The car’s ambitious rear suspension was perhaps the biggest cost impediment, and final prototypes reverted to a conventional solid rear axle riding on mono-leaf semi-elliptic springs.
GM built vast factory space to build the Cadet and its new components, but in 1947, in the midst of the huge post war boom for cars, GM saw no reason to risk capital and scarce facilities on the Cadet, and pulled the plug. Chevy’s Sales Team had been asked if they could move 300k per year, and they gave a thumbs down. MacPherson soon left for Ford, where his struts found a welcome home. The last Cadet prototype was destroyed in 1968, right about the time the Vega was being developed. Hmm.
Anyway, a fascinating story, and a classic GM one at that. Aim for the moon; chicken out. Or cheap out, if it did get built. At least with small cars.
A cool idea no doubt but in the car starved post-war boom, the auto makers could sell anything they built. It was a bigger-is-better world of cheap gas and I, the most ardent GM Hater there ever was, sincerely doubt that GM could have sold enough to make money. They would have most likely cannibalised the sales of the 150 line.
My two cents, anyway. But since they are Canukistani cents, they are only worth 1/5 of Real American Cents anyhow.
Interesting thought. I am inclined to give GM a pass on this one. First, it was selling everything it could, so why pull a Studebaker and introduce a fresh new car when everyone is on production quotas from the government anyway.
Second, I am just not convinced that there was a market for these. Not even GM could have gotten the price down significantly from a standard Chevy, and a Chevy was still a reasonably sized car then. All of the independents tried a compact, and all of them failed. All of those compacts (except, perhaps, for the Henry J) was a pretty good car.
The only reason to need smaller than a Chevy was either operating economy or price. War rationing of fuel was over and fuel again became cheap in the U.S., so that was out. Besides, if you wanted 30 mpg, Studebaker offered the Champion.
As for price, a strippo Chevy was pretty inexpensive. Want cheaper? Then buy a used car. I once read that the American compacts’ biggest competitor was used cars from the major companies. A 2 year old Chevrolet or Plymouth was a good car and a lot cheaper than a new Willys Aero or Hudson Jet.
My take on this is that GM still had at that time the corporate brains and judgment to talk down a brilliant engineer who had worked himself out onto the ledge. Just because you CAN do something doesn’t mean it’s a good idea. The only place this car could have succeded, in my view, was in a foreign market. But I will leave this issue to those more qualified to discuss it.
Very interesting. This surely must have been developed at roughly the same time as the Holden, which is very similar in overall specification but completely conventional apart from being unitary construction rather than a full chassis. I wonder if there was any connection, I am not overly familiar with the details of the development of the Holden 48-215 other than a couple of the original US-built prototypes still exist.
The article specifically says that it wasn’t connected to the Holden project, which was developed along more conventional lines like GM’s European cars.
Holdens 48-215 was basicly an Aussie built Vauxhall right down to the over sized sideplate and cylinderhead bolt arrangement even the humpy shape mirrored the LIP model. Holden used wishbone suspension where Vauxhall had a Chev style kneeaction front end
Yes I saw that, but two similar projects in the same company… even Alec Issigonis and the Rootes Group designers of the Hillman Imp compared notes, Issigonis actually drove a prototype Imp.
Bryce, the Holden was developed in the US though, one expects the Vauxhall was done in England. Yes it is quite similar but everything is different, engine, dimensions etc.
The engine is the same size as the Cadet – 132.8/133ci
From wiki, which sounds highly plausible:
The design was originally penned in the United States by Chevrolet before World War II, but was rejected because it was deemed too small for the U.S. market. Instead the design became the basis of the 48-215 model. Development of the 48-215 began in 1944. Three prototypes were built by hand in 1946 by American and Australian engineers at the General Motors workshop in Detroit. Months of durability and performance testing were undergone in the US before the three prototypes were shipped to Australia. Registered as JP-480, prototype no.1 is the only survivor of the three test sedans which became the definitive model for millions of Holden cars. The sole surviving prototype, Holden Prototype Car No. 1, is part of the National Museum of Australia collection.
The Holden 48-215 is clearly an older, pre-war design than the Cadet, with a taller profile, old-fashioned fenders, etc.
But obviously, nothing was done in 100% isolation, and it seems plausible that there was some correlation of the Holden and Cadet motor, although the SIA article makes it quite clear that the Cadet motor was still being substantially modified as the project went on.
The best information I’ve found indicates that the Holden 48/215 was not based on the Cadet, nor was it a Vauxhall. It was based on one of a trio of unitized prototypes GM developed in the mid-thirties as part of an earlier Light Car Project; some of the engineering team worked with Opel on monocoque body engineering, but it was intended for North America. There were three prototypes, the 195-Y-13, 195-Y-15, and 195-Y-17, all completed around 1936. They were mothballed when the U.S. entered the war.
(It’s worth noting that Chrysler also worked on a small car program in the mid-thirties, the so-called “Star Cars,” which had Airflow-style streamlining and bridge-and-truss construction, but FWD and a peculiar five-cylinder radial engine. Chrysler gave up on it as a North American project around 1938 and tried unsuccessfully to find a European licensee before abandoning it.)
In late 1944, when the Australian government asked for proposals for a locally manufactured car, GM dusted off the 195-Y-15 prototype, which became the basis of the 48/215. This was a few months before development of the Cadet began.
I don’t know the full story of the Holden “Grey Motor,” but its similarity to the Cadet engine (2,160 cc, 60 hp, OHV) does suggest that they were probably very similar, if not identical.
Thanks for filling in the info Aaron. Paul that wiki is out of date, a second of the three US-built prototypes turned up a few years ago.
ps does a fwd 5cyl radial count as radical or just plain nuts?
The 48/215 was developed in the States, but it was not uncommon for Vauxhall models to be at least partly engineered (and usually styled) in the U.S. in that era. There was a special projects and export vehicles studio that did a lot of design work for Vauxhall and Opel in that period; at the time the Holden was developed, I believe Frank Hershey was running it (at least from mid-’45). That didn’t last as GM’s subsidiaries built up their own facilities and organization, of course, although since running one of the overseas styling facilities was a common career step for U.S. designers, the gap still wasn’t as vast as one might think.
This is not correct. The 48-215 was developed from 2 prewar prototypes (195Y13 4cyl & 195Y15 6cyl) which could only have come from Opel. By the late 30’s Opel had well refined the lightweight small six / unitary body vehicle. Vauxhall’s unitary cars were much heavier & more difficult to build. Looking at late 40’s /early 50’s Vauxhall workshop manuals confirms there underbody design was quite different. I would suggest reading Don Lofler’s excellent book “Shes A Beauty” which discusses in detail the design & evolution of the first Holdens. The body was definitely done in the US (hence the Buick style grille) but the underbody must have been Opel. After all ALL REAL HOLDEN’S WERE DERIVED FROM OPEL’S & not from antiquated Chevy’s. Yes that means 48-215 through to HG & VB to VL Commodore. I have an HG & 3 VL’s – funny about that!
Maybe it wouldn’t have sold in 1947, but who says it won’t sell in 2012? Un-fair the front wheels, replace the 12-in donuts with 15-inchers and put a direct-injected 1.6L inline 4 under the hood. Add 6 airbags. Keep the rest of the car as is (including the exotic rigid drive tubes, a mid-mount 6-speed dual-clutch trans and of course struts all around)
It will be way “cooler” than the current batch of retro compacts (MINI, Beetle, FIAT 500). Even the Cadet name is much better than “Cruze”
Interesting design in that it appears to be a shrunken 1946 – 50 Kaiser! Doors, roof, and fenders all have the same lines as Kaiser only the hood and rear of the car are much shorter than the Kaiser. Windshield on the Cadet is slightly more vertical than Kaiser. Also, maybe this is where Nash got the idea for not cutting out the wheel wells on its early fifties models. I never really liked that look. Anyway, thanks for uncovering another car I had never known about.
Those were all pretty common styling themes knocking around at the time.
With the smaller wheels and tires, the Cadet has the proportions of a bigger car. By itself or at a distance it probably looked more normal.
JPC makes a good point about big 3 used cars. Alfred P. Sloan thought of cheap used cars as the entry level to the GM brand ladder. Get them as trade-ins to keep the whole new car transaction in the GM dealer, sell them at the dealer to bring new drivers into the fold.
Used cars were OK at GM.
http://www.flickr.com/photos/vintageroadtrip/4527949561/
“I know you are looking for a good used car, but would you consider an OK used car instead?”
OK Good!
http://www.flickr.com/photos/dana73mod/2754874581/in/faves-23458529@N03/
Where my dad worked they sold OK used cars mostly GM other stuff was wholesaled away, OK may have been better back in the day than now.
According to that article, the Cadet weighed in at 2200 pounds — about 100 or so less than the ’60 Corvair depending on body and trim level. The Cadet’s six displaced 132 cubic inches and produced a meager 64 HP. In contrast, the base ’60 Corvair engine had 140 cubes and provided 80 HP of get up and go. The base ’60 Vair was pretty slow, but tolerable. Would the Cadet’s 0-60 time be something best measured with an hourglass?
Those power-to-weight figures aren’t too far off from the subcompacts of the seventies. And the performance of standard-size cars was pretty meager – Chevy and Plymouth didn’t yet have V8s and flathead sixes were still the norm.
Yeah, if I can remember correctly a manual shift 1950 Chevrolet 0-60 was in the 17-19 second range (similar to a powerglide Corvair). Meanwhile, a powergilde equipped 1950 Chevy, even with the 105hp truck six, took 27.5 seconds to get to 60.
It’s an era where the Olds 88’s 12.2 0-60 was considered lightning quick. I don’t know any new car that is that slow.
It probably would have been around 30 seconds — not terribly far off of an early VW Beetle.
I don’t see it as a deadly mistake. First, it’s been shown time and time again…smaller isn’t cheaper; for the buyer or the manufacturer. There being no real advantage to the size, in the era of 27-cent-a-gallon gas…there was no upside to purchasing it and some losses in interior room.
Second…although the technology was advanced, none of it, except MacPherson’s struts, carried into today’s small cars. So the idea of getting a leg up on the future is lost here, also. And adapting strut front suspensions was no real challenge to manufacturers, above and beyond tooling costs. Chrysler did it, easily, while in a sea of red ink, with its Omnirizon twins.
I see this as an evolutionary dead end. It would have been a slick package if it had become the standard Chevrolet, and emphasized the difference between the lower and higher divisions…but that was not to be; the numbers weren’t right.
And, like it or not, the numbers are THE deal-buster. The independents showed, time and again, revolutionary ideas without a positive bottom line is a recipe for liquidation.
To this day (02/26/2008), GM has never had a successful, profitable American small car program.”
There. Fixed it for you. 😉
Seriously though, the various generations of Opel/Vauxhall Kadett/Astra/Chevette (all small cars by US standards) have been the mainstay of GM Europe since the 70s. Getting “small” cars right was one of the big reasons GM rose to the #2 spot in the UK car market during my childhood.
They took a little longer to get our kind of “small” right, but their Corsa’s been a raging success since the “B” gen’s introduction in ’93, and while it usually trails behind Ford’s all-conquering Fiestas, it remains a fixture on European best seller lists.
GM can, and have done small cars well. I think their failure to pitch one successfully in the states has a lot more to do with the tastes and prejudices of American car buyers (who are only just now waking up to the fact that small doesn’t have to mean rubbish) than with GM’s (many and indisputable) deadly sins.
Those same Opels and Vauxhalls morph into Holdens down here and mostly have a good record The J series Camira was rubbish but the rest were/ are ok They are certainly more drivable than Japanese cars which are bland ill handling appliances. There has never been a small successful American car from GM The OHC Vauxhall 4 was good enough for Lotus but not for the Vega GM NA really knows engine design NOT
Apologies – I should of course have included the Holdens. My flatmate while I lived in Perth drove a much loved Holden Astra “G”, so I’ve no excuse for forgetting them.
In my defence though Holden do play about to a baffling degree with which other GM division they borrow their small cars from: for example replacing the splendid little (Corsa C based) XC Barina with the ropey (Daewoo Kalos based) TK Barina (what were they thinking?!)
… they were thinking it was Cheap! (this was the Aveo for those following in the States) It worked too, sales increased a lot although the 2 star crash rating of the sedan proved to be an embarrassment.
Not to forget that before the Corsa-based Barina there was the Suzuki Swift based models in the mid-80s to 1991 or so. The US had those as the Geo Metro. Holden had the 5 door hatch, Suzuki could only sell the 3 door version. Then there was the badge-engineered mid-80’s Holden Astra that was actually a Nissan…
I fixed the text too (North American). Opel was always strong with small cars. And the other overseas ops became (mostly) successful with them too; had to in order to survive. Didn’t keep GM from going down back home, where it counted most of all.
The Cadet was an interesting design that was ahead of its time. The foreign car invasion was about ten years off, and in 1947 gas was cheap and wartime rationing was long gone. It’s interesting to think what would have happened if General Motors had dusted off and updated the design, restyled the Cadet and released it instead of the
Corvair. How would have that changed things for GM?
I’ve speculated on that too. Could have been a nice alternative to the Corvair.
Well, the Cadet’s styling was SO dated by that point that it would have had be completely redesigned, with more modern proportions, enough that it would have been like starting from scratch. From that, you have a unitized, FR compact with a smallish inline six — or basically a Ford Falcon. (The Falcon didn’t have front struts, although it did have high-mounted coils, à la early Rambler.) When the Corvair proved to be less successful than the Falcon, Chevy did indeed rush out just such a car, the Chevy II/Nova. Obviously, the Chevy II and the Cadet aren’t exactly the same, but you could make a fair case that the Chevy II is what the Cadet concept looked like in 1962 terms.
Actually you had a Ford Zephyr with struts already a much better car than the early Falcon
The Zephyr wasn’t sold in the States in any numbers, though. In the sixties, a few U.S. Ford dealers sold Cortinas, and in the seventies, Lincoln-Mercury marketed the Capri, but beyond that, Ford’s non-U.S. cars were unknown territory for Americans.
Can’t side with you on this article, Paul. We are, looking at the Cadet from hindsight, and the ‘blight’ of the Vega, Citation and ’82 and ’83 J-cars.
In ’47, brilliant as a design as this car was, GM corporate was wise to nix this one.
I believe, the engine and solid rear axle design did go into the first Holden, along with many other incidental hardware pieces, etc.
It WAS in postwar America, a better value to buy that 1-3 year old Plymouth/Chevy/Ford/Studebaker than it was to go for a Henry J/Aero Jet.
Rambler exempt here because Nash-Kelvinator did their homework and decided to ‘dress up’ the Rambler as a well equipped niche small(er) car – the perfect 2nd car – not a car to be heralded as the “everyman’s car” – which is what Kaiser and Ward Canaday tried to do – and failed – because at that time people DID see the better value in the 1-3 year old Plymouth/Stude/Chevy/Ford.
The brilliance of the Cadet should’ve been around when planning the Vega – but – GM probably would’ve found a way to ‘cheapen’ that effort too . . . . and we might have ended up with . . . well, a Vega.
My $0.02.
This is an interesting project that it would seen did not entirely die. Rather it ended up donating the engine and rear suspension to the first Holden which was combined with a body that was remarkably like a shortened light weight 1947 Buick Special. The resemblance between the FX Holden and the above Buick is truly striking, especially when viewed from the front. Even the vertical slats on the grill can be seen as just a simplified version of the classic Buick slats (see attached image). This is apparent if one looks at the images of the Holden 48-215 on Wikipedia. These first cars even used the same paint colour.
So the Cadet never really died, it just morphed into a car more suited to a country where petrol rationing continued for another 4 years. In Australia the car was a huge success and laid the groundwork for 30 years of market dominance by Holden.
I remember reading in one of the big car magazines in the early 70s where they interviewed the Big 4 and they asked why they did not build a $1000 car. The universal reply was that the nation’s used car lots were full of the finest $1000 cars anyone would ever see. These days this sort of thing has been essentially proved by the sluggish sales of the Tata Nano. It is hard to imagine that anyone could produce a car too basic even for India but since car ownership is an aspirational thing, people want something better than a buckboard.
Internal G M politics ended Macpherson’ s career at GM and he was hired by Ford where he proceeded to design a simplified more modern version of the Cadet. This became the Mark 1 Consul and Zephyrs with modern fender less styling unitary construction short stroke overhead valve engines.Coupled with advanced production techniques these cars transformed the British car market The last Ford to follow Macpherson’s design principles was the 1975 Escort mk2 still very competitive with the more advanced European designs.These cars comprehensively outsold their American cousins in countries such as Australia, South Africa and New Zealand
America coulda gone the way they did to the east and west (europe, japan) and avoided 2 big losses the American auto industry got desimated by:
in the late 50s early ’60s by the Vee Dub Bug;
in the early 70s thru early 80s – the Japanese invasion.
We’re still catchin up!
– -Chad
If the engine used in the 1946 Chevy Cadet is indeed the same as the Holden Straight-Six motor, than it could have also potentially allowed for a smaller 1446cc+ Inline-4 model to check the VW Beetle before the engine potentially grows into a 2198cc Inline-4 by the time it ceases production in the mid-1980s.
The relationship between the resultant smaller 4-cylinder and larger 6-cylinder Chevy Cadet models would have been similar to related 4-cylinder and 6-cylinder models in the UK, such as the 4-cylinder Vauxhall Wyvern (later Victor) and 6-cylinder Vauxhall Velox (later Cresta) or the 4-cylinder Ford Consul and 6-cylinder Ford Zephyr.
If this car was worth doing, it was worth doing in a market where a car its size would have been the norm, then maybe brought into the USA as a captive import. If the public went nuts over it and GM got tired of paying tariffs and shipping costs, some aspects of production could have been ramped up in the USA as needed. That is only a few steps beyond what what happened with the Pinto and the Horizon, two of the more successful US-made small cars, both of which started out with some imported major components which were replaced with American versions when finances and logistics permitted. The lowest cost car making locations almost always have a viable market for small cars, so in addition to convincing Americans to accept a lot less car for a little less money, anyone trying to build everything here will always have the most competition from emerging carmaking countries. Some things sound good, but they just aren’t worth trying.
As for the car itself, the struts were obviously ahead of their time, though to reinforce my prior comment, they would have been hard to justify on a unique, potentially low volume model. Though they were cheap enough to make, at least when not counting R&D, it took years before they shook the reputation they had in the 1970s for being an expensive repair job waiting to happen. And the mid-transmission design just seems weird. It probably helped weight distribution, but it still left the clumsy handling and massive space consumption of a live rear axle and differential intact. If there was a way at that time to implement such a radical re-think of car layouts, a transverse-mounted transmission in the rear would have seemed like a more attractive way to do it.
Paul, I just learned that the 1948-built “Chevy plant” in Parma (suburban Cleveland), Ohio was to have been the (or perhaps “a”) assembly site for the Cadet, before the project was halted…photo didn’t load, so I’ll try to tack it on in Comment:
Here we go (I grew up close by, but never knew this):
Interesting follow-up…this is a year earlier, mid-April 1946. Chevy is going to build the facility to assemble the car in Parma, Cleveland’s SW suburb, and then a handful of miles to the west will build another plant to provide parts–on a Brook Park parcel that basically rubs elbows with where Ford would soon build its two Engine Assembly plants and Cleveland Foundry. Who knew?
Nice addition to the story. It confirms just how far along they were towards building it.
I wonder if anyone has ever written up the Cadet story in-depth?