To woo back buyers who might have been scared off by Ralph Nader’s famous safety assault, Chevrolet redesigned its air-cooled compact, the Corvair, in 1965. It was a much-improved car, but sales continued to decline, and Chevy moved on in 1969 after 10 years. The seller’s 1965 Monza coupe has project written all over it, and we may have seen the same car here on Barn Finds a couple of years ago. Located in Seattle, Washington, this tip from T.J. is now available here on craigslist for $4,900.
Was the Corvair an unsafe car? Although 1.8 million buyers disagreed with him between 1960 and 1969, Ralph Nader thought it was. The concern was for the car to flip over during extreme turns, so Chevrolet changed the handling dynamics of the little car in 1964, and those continued with the second generation of the automobile the following year. If you recall, the Corvair had an air-cooled engine mounted in the rear like the VW Beetle (this was a first for U.S. automakers and did not create imitation).
The Corvair’s decline in sales didn’t land squarely on Nader’s shoulders. The Ford Mustang, with its sporty looks and routine engineering, drew buyers away from the Corvair, too, and Chevy didn’t even promote the car starting in 1968. The seller doesn’t tell us much about this 1965 Monza Sport Coupe, and it looks suspiciously like one that our Michelle Rand reviewed in 2023. Same general location and color, but the one from ’23 has rear bumper guards in the photos, and this one does not. Surely the seller wouldn’t have bothered to remove them.
The current listing does not help sell the car. It provides no history or information as to whether the Chevy even runs. The paint is poor and will have to be redone, and there is no mention of any rust besides the surface variety. However, the contrasting interior seems to have mostly held up after 60 years. Clearly this is a project car, but we don’t know how much work might be entailed to rectify that.
Historical timeline’s a bit mixed up. Unsafe At Any Speed was published after the ’65s came out and GM had already zeroed out the Corvair development budget in favor of a crash F-body program even before the ’65 debut, in response to the Ford Mustang’s runaway success.
Let’s not forget Chevy was scrambling to get the Panther out also. Better known to most of the younger crowd as the Camaro. Ford was on fire with the Mustang and the pony car era was born. I didn’t mention for the Mopar folks a redesigned Valiant know as the Barracuda.
You can see that it had bumper guards on the front bumper at one time.
Advertiser states that they have two other corvairs.
How much you want to bet that one of them is sporting (new) bumper guards.
I think Russ’ suspicions are correct.
I reached out to the seller last year. While the color combination is not often seen it doesn’t demand a premium over a similar 65 Corvair. It’s a $2500 car at best based on the amount of rust and condition and I’m being generous.
“Unsafe at any Speed” contained a line drawing illustration showing the Corvair’s swing axles tucking under the rear end under hard cornering. The angle of tuck-under was highly exaggerated, but the phenomenon was credited with the abrupt transition of weight transfer leading to loss of control. The solution was to adjust the front tire pressures (to 15 lbs psi I believe) and to affix a single transverse leaf spring under the rear end to limit the travel of the swing axles.
Ralph Nader was an earnest and sincere advocate for consumer safety but he had limited automotive engineering expertise. His book was rather sensationalist and appealed to the nascent consumerist movement. GM was in no mood to confront those zealots, plus as Cadmanls stated above, they were scrambling to get a Mustang competitor in production.
In typical mid-’60s fashion GM caved to what it perceived as popular opinion and gave up on the Corvair. As thousands of dedicated Corvair aficionados would agree – what a shame. I owned a ’65 500 coupe with a 3-speed for a short time. Never had any issues with it and I consider it the best-styled small car of all time.
Because of low weight on the front end, when you put 30 psi in them the contact patch of the tire is about a square inch. No car handles good with over inflated tires.
@ccrvtt Heh-zealots….What happened to my post-the one to which you were obviously responding? It all looks a little one legged now. Corporate censorship of history is always never a good idea. Peace out.
It was a long time ago. Give it a rest.
Ralph Nader has always been useless. The only thing he ever accomplished was a reputation as a cry-baby and a hack.
I drove a 1963 (I think) Pontiac Tempest for a while in High School, also had swing axles. Oh what fun I had hanging the rear end out in even relatively slow cornering.