(note: GM’s Deadly Sins are not numbered chronologically. This is a new and heavily revised version of the original) There it is, a golden yellow Vega, seductive and infinitely irresistible, hanging from the tree of automotive disappointment. Its serpent maker found plenty of smitten takers (especially among the motor press), because the bitter truth imparted upon biting the bait was apparently in a time-release potion: “The best handling car ever sold in America” (Road &Track). Winner of Motor Trend’s 1971 COTY. C/D readers voted it the best economy car three years in a row. It won a 1971 C/D six small car comparison, from which we’ll borrow some key elements for this review. The Vega was not a calorie-laden fake-fruit rollup; it was a genuine apple with wholesome good looks and it could taste good, in the right variety.
And yet the Vega went on to be one of its maker’s biggest Deadly Sins. So much promise; such a letdown.
I (mentally) bit too, having spent idle hours in 1971 with a Vega brochure specifying a yellow Kammback GT exactly like this one. But sure enough, the sweetness of that first bite evaporated all too quickly: the apple was rotten at the (engine) core. The Vega was GM’s watershed moment, the foreshadowing of its inevitable demise. And yet here I am some fifty years later, totally smitten and thinking how fun it would be to tool around in another one of my seductive youthful loves.
Let’s step into our time machine. It’s 1971, we’re wearing bell-bottoms, and want desperately to love the Vega as much as we love peace. Its coming was hyped by GM for years as nothing less than the reinvention of the small car, GM’s version of the Apollo moon shot. Sound familiar?
Now we haven’t bitten into the apple of knowledge yet; we’re just sniffing around the delicious edges of the Bill Mitchell styled mini-Camaro to try to understand what all the hoopla, awards and press accolades were all about. Or was GM delivering its press cars with a big baggie of Acapulco Gold in the glove box? Oops; the Vega doesn’t have a glove box, as well as a few other components normally taken for granted, thanks to GM’s ever-diligent bean counters.
GM’s corporate styling was still at the top of their game in 1971. But there sure was a lot of borrowing going on here, although to good effect.
The basic Vega sedan was a blatant rip-off of the lovely Fiat 124 Coupe.
The hatchback coupe’s roofline was heavily cribbed from the Ferrari 365 GT 2+2.
The Kammback wagon owed more than a hat-tip to the Reliant Scimitar shooting brake. And of course, the
Vega’s egg-crate grille front end was a re-do of GM’s own excellent ’55 Chevy, which in turn was of course cribbed from various Pininfarina Ferraris.
And of course there was the distinct similarity to the 1970 Camaro. Nothing wrong with that! The Vegas and Camaro were some of the best styled cars to come out of GM’s vaunted Design Center.
But styling and design are not exactly the same thing. The real question was why Chevy wanted such a low-slung, “sporty” car with terrible space utilization. The charming Kammback was really more of a shooting brake than a proper wagon; hardly in the image of GM’s big wagons, or such practical competitors as the Datsun 510 wagon, which actually had the luxury and practicality of four doors!
GM’s President Ed Cole, a former engineer and father of the Chevy V8 and Corvair, gave the development of the XP-887 “import killer” to a corporate development group.
And then he forced the half-baked results on a reluctant John Z. DeLorean, General Manager of Chevrolet. The “not invented here” maxim maximized, especially as regards the engine. Chevy’s Engine Group already had a conventional small four banger on the drawing table. But the corporate skunk works had grander (“cheaper” in GM-speak) things in mind. But JZD had no choice but to put on a good face, an altered one at that.
GM had dropped a mint on a huge aluminum foundry operation to build the Corvair engine. And the ill-fated Corvair died in 1969. See where this is going? The Vega will have an aluminum block because…“it’s 51 lbs lighter than the pedestrian and dead-reliable Chevy II four block”. Right. Well, an aluminum head on the Chevy block would have offset the (are you ready for it?) cast-iron head on top of the Vega aluminum block. GM was determined to turn small car engine design upside down, literally. Oh well, Pontiac’s cast-iron four (“Iron Duke”), a revised and updated Chevy II 153 four, ended up replacing the ill-starred Vega engine anyway.
Since the dawn of the twentieth century, light but soft aluminum has been used for engine blocks along with durable iron cylinder sleeves. That solution would have cost Chevy exactly $8 per engine. They were planning to build millions of them. Cheapness is the mother of malfunction. So GM and Reynolds Aluminum came up with the idea to incorporate 17% silicon in the alloy, and devised a way to etch the top molecules of aluminum from the cylinder bore surface to expose the hard silicon, and voila! An eight dollars saved is an eight dollars earned!
Actually, this was only one part of the Vega engine problems. Mercedes and Porsche went on to perfect this process, and now it’s ubiquitous. It was the other shortcuts that really made it so, like cheap self-destructing valve guides, a grossly undersized cooling system, a small oil pan, etc.. Overheating, or oil consumption from the bad valve guides meant that the less-forgiving cooling system or limited oil capacity conspired with the fragile open-deck block, which then blew up, figuratively and literally. But that won’t be happening on a mass scale until 1973 or so, unless you’re one of the unlucky early adopters of Vega maladies.
The Vega’s engine was unusual in other ways too. It had a long stroke and big displacement (2.3 liters) for a four, and was tuned for low specific output (90 gross, 80 net hp) at a lazy 4400 rpm. The result was a big flat torque curve: 136 lb/ft of torque at 2400 rpm, more than double small import engines like the Simca 1100’s. GM wanted the Vega to have that lazy V8 feel, the secret to blowing those pesky, buzzy imports off the freeway. The result was more agricultural than V8, or in 1971 terminology, bad vibrations. Balance shafts would have broken GM’s profit targets. As did the lack of them, although that alone would not have solved all the Vega’s problems.
One of the Vega’s earliest problems was its seemingly inexplicable tendency to explode mufflers. In a classic Rube Goldbergian way, severe engine vibration caused a carburetor bolt to loosen, causing the carb cover to jump up and down, causing the accelerator pump to pump, causing raw gas to flow down those less than stellarly sealed silicon bores, causing gas to puddle in the exhaust, causing said explosions, causing Vega owners to abandon their ride in mid traffic and duck for cover behind the nearest Pinto whose own explosive tendencies weren’t yet common knowledge.
But the torque was there, and Americans love deep-fried torque with their pork. Who wants to shift when you’ve got a tenderloin sandwich in one hand and a milkshake in the other while cruising I-70? GM had your number(s): the combination of an extremely long 2.53-to-1 axle ratio resulted in 2600 rpm at seventy mph. Relaxed cruising indeed, and a masking of the Vega’s “disturbingly loud when revved” thrashing sounds.
But wait, you enthusiasts hoping for a mini Z28 or BMW 2002 beater, it gets worse. The standard Vega transmission is a three-speed stick, with ratios so wide that combined with that long axle it “feels more like a 6-speed with first, third and fifth gears missing. It always seems like you are starting in second, and the gaps between the gears are not valleys, but canyons”. (yes, original shifter knobs for it are still available on eBay)
I have an alternate description: a two-speed stick with a long overdrive. Either way, not very sporty, considering the Vega’s sporty styling. GM was sending mixed messages.
But the GM engineer’s unorthodox thinking worked, after a fashion. The Vega was the second fastest in the C/D small car comparison tests test after the wheel-spinning Gremlin, with a then-snappy 12.2 seconds in the 0-60, although it took a leisurely 16.5 seconds in a Road and Track comparison, where it lost out to the Toyota Corona and Datsun 510. Seems like a huge difference, given both were specced the same way, maybe even the very same car.
Good thing they didn’t test the automatic. Hooked up to the venerable two-speed Powerglide, forward thrust was truly glacial, or at least felt (and sounded) like it. I know; a good friend was a very early Vega adopter/burn victim. I drove it. It really sucked. It felt like it was dragging a sledge behind it. That was all the bite of the apple I needed to feel like retching, and I began my personal GM Death Watch right then and there.
Handling (and cute looks, on the pre-safety bumper versions) was always the Vega’s one dynamic strong point: “Handling is very good with mild understeer and tolerant breakaway characteristics. The biggest surprise is the steering, which is light and accurate…the Vega is quick and nimble”. And that’s the base Vega; the GT got an uprated suspension.
C/D’s un-GT sedan version garnered heavy criticism for its interior: Klutzy hard plastic moldings and an instrument panel with nothing more than a horizontal speedometer. The floor is wall-to-wall black rubber, and all the controls required exceptionally long travel. The missing glove box. And the Pinto has a bigger back seat than the considerably bigger and heavier Vega. GM’s bean counters were all over it. But despite the cost-cutting, the Vega was not cheap; in fact it cost a full 15% more than the other competitors and weighed some 400 lbs more. Satisfying American’s lazy highway cruising habits came at a price, as it always has.
The truth is, this comparison is all wrong given the Vega’s price point. It should have been compared to the Datsun 510 or Toyota Corona, which it was by R&T, and the Vega lost to both of them.
And a nicely optioned GT wagon like this one would have put it right in BMW 1602/2002 territory. The outcomes would have been all too different.
With the benefit of hindsight, it’s of course utterly obvious to see how the future played out. But the Vega’s self-destructive tendencies weren’t the only reason for its demise. Once the Corolla got a bigger engine and a five-speed, it ran circles around the Vega and Pinto. The VW Beetle soon died, to be replaced by the brilliant Golf/Rabbit.
But in a way, those comparisons with import brands is somewhat irrelevant, as the Vega was clearly targeted to domestic-brand buyers/intenders who were interested in a smaller version of a Nova, Camaro or Chevelle. Of course some import owners/intenders were also sucked into the Vega’s deadly vortex, especially in GT form. And some escaped the worst of the issues.
The Vega had a decent sales start. But its biggest sales year was 1974, when it hit the top-ten seller list thanks to the energy crisis as well as the top of the national shit list thanks to mass engine crises. In 1975, sales plummeted, and by 1977 “amnesia Vegatitus acute” became a new national mental health epidemic.
Soon enough, the Vega was anything but cute. It became a meme, before those were common.
All the more reason why just finding this gem of an early Vega GT Kammback was such a thrill. I’d seen the nose of this yellow Vega in an old garage downtown some years ago.
And suddenly, there it was, sitting in front of a hand-made artisanal broom company. What a perfect setting; and where else but in Eugene? Well, witches need wheels too, to go buy their brooms. And the Vega certainly was cursed from the get-go.
And this one, the first non hot-rodded V8 Vega I’ve seen in maybe a decade, is exactly the color and configuration that got my juices going while mentally masturbating with a Vega brochure in 1971: optional two-barrel 110 (gross) hp engine, four-speed stick, and that GT instrument panel with full gauges. Only the lovely GT wheels are MIA.
And this gem was for sale! The owner is reducing her carbon-footprint and going all-broom all the time. And it actually runs, on its original (although possibly sleeved) engine. The serpent is still at work; the apple is more tempting now than ever. And the irony is not just in my (cylinder) head: driving a GM car, the very one that first started GM’s terminal decline, yet a car no one under thirty-five recognizes in this terminally PC town of bikes, brooms, Priii, old Volvos and W123’s is a delicious thought. I’ll just put a “powered by Biodiesel” sticker on it, ‘cause it sure shakes and quivers like an old Mercedes 240 Diesel. Or maybe convert it to an EV and put “Bolt” badges on it. Mmm; delicious!
Note: this a heavily revised and updated post from 2011.
Related CC reading:
Curbside Recycling: 1973 Chevrolet Vega Kammback – Oy Vega! 50+ Years Of Long(roof) Memories by J. Klein
Vintage Snapshot And R&T Article: 1971 Chevrolet Vega Yenko Stinger – The Little Known Yenko by Rich Baron
Curbside Classic: 1975 Opel 1900 (Ascona) – What The Vega Could Have Been by PN
Return To The Great Vega Hunt, Part II: 1971-73 Chevrolet Vega in Las Vegas by W. Stopford
COAL: 1971 Chevrolet Vega – The Little Car That Did Everything Well, Well Maybe… by 83 LeBaron
Vintage R&T Road Test: 1973 Chevrolet Vega GT – Improved, Up To A Point by PN
AH, the 40k mile Vega engine. There were 2 cures, sleeve it or small block it.
Quite a few were Buick V-6 swaps, too.
My first car was a 74 Vega GT. I wanted a 71 Cuda but then this thing showed up called the gas crisis/oil embargo and suddenly everyone was talking gas mileage instead of horsepower and these things called catalytic converters were on cars and they smelled like rotten eggs and the bumpers grew to ugly proportions.I ordered it from the factory with all the options,dark blue, black interior, 3 or 4 sp stick (cant remember) fast back. I waited 3 months for it to arrive. I recall it was $3495 plus tax. I had it Ziebarted but with in 6 months the first rust worms started showing up in the back lift lid. I don’t recall the oil burning issues but I was pretty good at keeping an eye on things. My nostalgic eye sees them from time to time and thinks about getting another one and fixing all the flaws GM should of fixed but putting a V6 or V8 in it. I think I’ll just stick with my fond memories of the good times I had in it and leave it at that.
Domestic makers selling attractive junk, helping seal their fate/reputations.
I always found it galling, that the cost of severe premature rusting, was so readily downloaded to the little guy. Car owners. The type of rust that takes cars off the road, prematurely. And permanently. Back then, so many car owners had to pay professionally, for rust repairs. Or pay to do it themselves, after just a few years of new car ownership. So many college auto body courses, and how-to books, at the time. Not including, premature wallet-breaking mechanical repairs.
Seemed opportunities existed repeatedly with carmakers selling junk, and with the Vega/Astre here, for some one-stop third party to offer quality rustproofing, larger radiators, cylinder liners, etc. A $129.00 (or whatever fair price) package, to keep your Vega on the road, for five more years at least. With a warranty. While your Chevrolet dealer, tells you to blow off.
Take advantage of the lacking response of the carmakers to resolve obvious shortcomings, in their sold products. So much exploitation seemed normal.
Rust is certainly a lost opportunity. Aluminum bodies were old. Pierce had them in 1905, the big Hudsons had them in the mid-20s. Kaiser could have used its own materials and skills in ’47, but they chose to buy scarce poor-quality steel instead.
Galvanized steel is also old, but nobody tried an all-galvanized body until AMC in 1980. By then it was too late to help AMC.
By the late ’70’s, my brother had to take his 1974 Maverick to a nearby wrecking yard, to have serious rust repairs made.
A less than five year old car, needing major rust repair… at a wrecking yard. Remarkable what people tolerated.
Vega/Astre went to galvanized bodies in 1976…
As a mechanic I recall a rough running Vega and was surprised to see all the screws on top of the carburetor loose. To be fair to GM they did rapidly work the bugs out of the Vega, and then when Vega morphed into the H body Monza Sunbirds became top sellers and pretty good cars. Lots of sophistication in the design, SLA front suspension, Torque arm tying powerplant to rear axle, zincrometal to fight rust. The 1975 Monza V-8 was the Motor Trend Car of the Year beating out notable competitors, even a Mercedes.
To be fair to GM, they did rapidly work the bugs out of the Vega.
On their own thoughtfulness?. After shafting thousands of buyers. And having their reputation, seriously damaged.
The bodies were as bad as the engines, especially in the wintry north where salt was on the roads. Everything rusted back then, but these things RUSTED. There would be massive holes in the body by the time the car was 4 years old. Maybe that saved many of the northern buyers from the engine woes.
Over the past fifty years, I’ve become convinced that I’m one of the few people who have owned a Vega from new (1973 GT in silver with the black stripe) and have nothing but good memories of it. This included three seasons of SCCA B-sedan autocross, a lot of rallying, and a sprint or two out at Nelson’s Ledges. Proudest moment was to take third place in the final autocross of the ’75 season, beating out an Alfa GTA, only to have the Misery Bay Region staff decide that since the Pittsburgh crew (heavy on BMW 1600’s and 2002’s) couldn’t make it up, this would be a ‘practice autocross’ and the real points gathering meet would be the next week.
I never went back. Neither did the other Vega GT owner who took second, or the guy with the heavily suspension modified Pinto 2.0 who won the class that day. Guess MBR couldn’t stand seeing American iron win. Not that there was any question as to who were going to take the class wins that season.
My experience with the Vega was good enough that I traded it on a 76 Monza 2+2 with five speed. Nice car but not quite as much fun. Equally reliable (no complaints at the time). Definitely not an autocrosser, was enjoyable in rallying. Three years later, I took one too many bites of the apple with a 79 Monza Kammback, V-6, five speed, and it went wrong from the moment go when GM cancelled the GT instrument package on me. Worst car I ever owned. So bad that the only Chevy’s I’ve owned since were my ’96 S-10 (it was good) and my current pair of Bolts (very very very happy with them).
Not good when you were raised in a Chevrolet dealership.
I’d wondered if they ever put the V6 in the wagon. That should have been a good car that late in the production run. Even the V6 was even-firing by then.
If looks were everything, Vega would have been a world-beater. It’s no secret many buyers were drawn in by the excellent styling. A repeat of the siren song of the 1957 Plymouth.
How many second owners, did the Vega burn? I remember a young guy in my parent’s neighbourhood, around 1977. Who acquired an early Vega. He probably was attracted by the cheap price, the appealing styling, and the fun of tinkering on a car.
The body was in terrible shape, and the 140 sounded like a farm tractor, because of the exhaust holes. He probably lacked objectivity. As the rest of us, more accurately saw it, as an embarrassing piece of junk. You could hear him approaching, a kilometre or two away. He was obviously trying, to bring the car back. As you could see the evolution of his bodywork. The lure and challenge of a project car, likely attracted many second owner young guys. A project, not worth resurrecting. Many, who threw their money away.
If it’s the early 1970s and I want a small 2-door station wagon from GM, I think I’ll head to my nearest Buick dealer and buy an Opel 1900 wagon.
My view is that GM Admin didn’t really want to build the Vega at all. They still wanted their larger models with the bigger profits and why waste their time on this. With profit so low on this car let’s ring everything out of it. So we got what might be called the first disposable throw away car. Although not the owner’s POV.
What really fascinates me is that Ed Cole was President at the time while Eiji Toyoda was President at Toyota. Both born at roughly the same time yet at opposite ends of the world. No doubt Cole’s view of the world forged by WWII just like Toyoda’s view. Of course vastly different. Was that a reason for the different long term trajectories in the two companies?
Not exactly. The second point was very definitely true: Detroit assumed that every right-thinking American wanted (or should want) a land yacht and had a lot of institutional trouble getting their heads around the reverse. However, they also boxed themselves in by loudly making a lot of grandiose promises about how this would be the ultimate import-killer, etc., so there were high expectations and a lot of corporate ego at stake that led Cole to take much control away from the division and give it to corporate Engineering Staff and Advanced design studios more divorced from the idea of working within specific production budgets. So, everything had to be aggressively de-contented late in the process to get the price closer to reason, with fairly catastrophic results.
It was like asking someone on a date, making a big deal out of how you’re going to serve them a four-course gourmet banquet, and then realizing you barely have enough cash for a KFC bucket meal.
“RIP-OFF” is a current common term ad-nauseam today, but it hits the bulls-eye when comparing the Vega to the Fiat.
A lovely looking car make no mistake .
I don’t grasp why / how GM didn’t run test mules hard and fast to see if that new engine was going to work as planned .
-Nate