Ah, that's it! I was expecting it to take more than 2 minutes but hey works for me.Corvair
I had one of those! It was a fun little car - but kind of a gas hog, IIRC. I bought it for $125, drove it for a year, and sold it for the same price. It had a new setCorvair
In the old days, many Corvair engines were converted for homebuilts.
...he just went to Corvair College.
To be more precise, a 110hp Corvair. The 140hp had four carbs and the 180hp had a turbo. Judging from the generator (as opposed to an alternator) I say it's a 60-64 vintage.
You misspelled "donor engine".Corvair
Corvair
I recall reading somewhere that the Corvair's engine was originally planned to be used in a piston engine helicopter competition that The Army was holding.
I owned two. The 4-carb 140 and the turbo 180, both 1965 (version two). In 65 they changed the suspension from the swing arm to parallel links. Did great in autocrosses. The turbo had a manifold pressure gauge on the dash. You could hear the turbo spin up and the MP go positive followed by a kick in the pants. (OK, not neck-jerking acceleration, but noticeable.)
One of the best kits was to turn your Corvair into a Corv8. A mid-engine V-8! You gained a trunk in the rear, but had to give up the one in front for the radiator.
My grandfather used to have one.
"Unsafe at Any Speed", Ralph Nader
I always liked Corvairs, and still saw some of them as commuter cars on the road well into the 90's. I always thought it was GM's answer to the bug, but maybe that is not really true.
As noted elsewhere above, Nader was a tool - the car was well-engineered, and the "unsafe" condition occurred only of the vehicle was operated in a very unsafe manner in the first place.
Not true at all - the Corvair was a vastly superior car to the VW Bug.
Agreed!
I never had either car, but from the outside the Corvair seemed to be a better performer overall. Wasn't the impetus for GM to produce a rear engine, air cooled car the VW Beetle? I always assumed that, but could be wrong. If not, I wonder why they went down that road (pun intended)?
The VW bug, on the other hand, was a cheap, bullet proof little econobox that could take a pounding and was never sold as a performer.
The concept of the Corvair was to produce something that could compete with the Porche boxer sports cars, but at a cheaper price and plus with a little more leg room. It was competing with the Porche, not the Volkswagen. The VW bug, on the other hand, was a cheap, bullet proof little econobox that could take a pounding and was never sold as a performer. It was the successor of the original "Volkswagen" (People's Car) that was originally developed in WWII Germany to be the ultimate affordable transit and employed the same engine and drive train. The Corvair tried to fill a niche market that had little following.
Thanks Sac. That makes sense. So the Corvair was s competitor of the 356/911 series? That's interesting. I know a little about the history of the Bug, as I mentioned in another thread my parents lived in post war Germany 1945 - 1948, and were going to bring an early Bug home with them, (cost was a few hundred dollars), but were concerned about parts availability. Not long after they returned to the U.S. VW started exporting Bugs to America, so they could have had all the parts they needed.
That's putting it mildly. One of VW's ads in the 60's (when muscle cars were king) made the claim -
0 - 60
Yes.
V-dubs were used for more sinister purposes: