The Chevy Corvair went out not with a bang, but a whimper, in 1969. Demand had been falling since Ralph Nader took the car to task in the middle of the decade in his book, Unsafe at Any Speed. By the last year of the 1960s, Chevrolet produced exactly 6,000 copies before retiring the product with minimal fanfare. The seller has a sharp ’69 Monza Sport Coupe, which is in great shape sans a little bubbling in the paint. Located in Middleburg, Florida, this blue beauty is available here on craigslist for $9,500. Our gratitude goes to Tony Primo for another awesome tip!
Just 10 years earlier, the Corvair was launched as Chevy’s first compact car. But the vehicle traveled a less common route for Detroit, using a rear-mounted, air-cooled engine that was in the same vein as the Volkswagen Beetle. That vehicle, and some Japanese imports, had incentivized U.S. automakers to start building smaller automobiles. American Motors and Studebaker led the way in the late 1950s, followed quickly by the “Big 3”.
We’re told this Monza was one of the last 1,000 Corvairs to roll off the assembly line in the early months of 1969. It has its original flat-six engine with an automatic transmission, but some newer touches have been added before reaching 75,000 miles. They include electronic ignition, an upgraded alternator, a fuel pump, brakes, and a rebuilt carburetor. Aftermarket air conditioning was installed to help the passengers cope with the hot summer temps in Florida.
The seller says this car is a “true survivor,” which in part would imply that the blue paint is from the factory. But there are some bubbles in the paint that should be corrected before they turn into rust holes. The interior looks good, but it looks as though the bucket seat bottoms have been recovered, as the material doesn’t quite match the seat backs. With add-on “mag” wheels, this car should do well at Cars & Coffee!
I think more than anything, the Camaro had a lot to do with the end of the Corvair. Base model Camaros came with 6cyl. engines and powerglides and were dad approved for young drivers. This is one nice looking car and there isn’t very many classics you can buy in this shape for under 10 grand. A good, solid, G.M. 60’s car. and to think just 2 years after this Chevy came out with the Vega. Ya gotta wonder what went wrong?
The Mustang Happened. Sporty Water-Pumper, reasonable price.
Corvair’s initial competitor was the Ford Falcon/Mercury Comet.
But when Mustang came out, Chevy had no real competitor as Corvair was marketed 90% as an economy Car.
The Camaro was on the books the day the Mustang was released and it was the number#1 competitor of the Mustang ever after.
Camaro rocker trim, inside and outside door handles, and window cranks are all Corvair.
Exactly
The rear-axle defect had been corrected for the 1964 model year with a camber compensator for the rear suspension starting in September 1963. The second generation went to the showrooms in September of 1964 with a radically re-engineered fully independent suspension. Nader’s book came out in August of 1965
The Ford’s conventional Falcon handily outsold the Corvair. It was more familiar, and had a lot more trunk space. So Chevy quickly created the Chevy II, canibalizing Corvair sales.
The Corvair shared very few major components with any other GM products, making it expensive to build. The Pontiac Tempest originally used its transaxle, and the legendary Q Corvette that was cancelled would have as well.
Chevy hoped that the market for the sporty models like its Turbos would carry the car forward, but then the Mustang landed in April of 1964. They ceased all development of the a third generation Corvair in April of 1965, and the entire design team was reassigned to develop the Camaro.
I had a 1969 Corvair. A wonderful car, but those late cars were assembled from crates of left-over parts, so there can be a lot of weird trim differences.
We love a scapegoat, and we love blamming bogey men, but the Corvair was a dead car walking before “Unsafe at Any Speed” hit the bookstores.
Really a shame, because if they had kept up with that third generation car, the dreadful Vega would not have happened
Indeed and, if anything, Nader gave the Corvair a new lease on life it might not have had otherwise, as GM was loath to be seen as capitulating to a muckraking busybody, especially when they’d already resolved the early Corvair issues identified in his book anyway. Didn’t hurt matters that this allowed them to extract some more revenue from the sunk costs they’d already invested in tooling up for the second-gen Corvair.
Powerglide
Good grief
Weekend warrior implies fast. Weekend cruiser would be a bit more accurate.
Steve R
My mother’s two cars had automatics and they were not that slow.
I agree. Growing up on used car dealerships, I came to drive many Chevrolet models, including Powerglide-equipped Covairs. And though I wouldn’t have owned one (I’ve always preferred manuals), they weren’t at all sluggish. Indeed, in their performance they equaled most other cars of their class and era.
You never drove one, I take it. They were transmissions that survived the 50’s 60’s and early 70’s They were basic to and from transmissions that understood the assignment. No fan fair, no speed demon. Just basic transportation.
Kudos to seller for providing pics of the rusty bits. Nice example.
Well, it’s refreshing to see I’m not the only one to call attention to that certain person that seemingly clings to every Corvair post. Well, nuts to Nader, this is the most beautiful Corvair I’ve seen in years. I’ve long said, the Corvair was the most significant car to come down the pike. Wasn’t an easy job, as in this time period, many drivers of faster cars, due to insurance woes, were relegated to driving Corvairs. They took a beating. Just too far out there for most, but I can’t think of another US car to have such a memorable impact than the Corvair,,,except maybe the Gremlin, :D
If there are bubbles, there are already rust holes.
If it’s been in Florida all these years, it’s got rust
Unless you live on the beach, Florida, which is as big as Italy, is generally a pretty good place for cars. No salted roads.
If you actually keep your car in your garage and not all that stuff that you should send to the dump, it’s perfect
Not necessarily. I had a 66 Marina Blue Corvair Monza (looked just like this one) that had never left California. I had it painted and the shop did a crappy job. There were bubbles on the trunk. They had to repaint it after I raised hell!
That is a common rust area on late model Corvairs. Leaves, seeds and debris fall through the grill below the windshield and drift and wash down to the lower areas of the cowl. Water also follows that same path and keeps the trash moist and plugs the drain holes in that area. The result is rust eating from the inside out of the dogleg behind the front wheel. The bubbling of the paint in that area indicates a really serious problem. Letting this continue will also start to eat out the rocker panels and damage the structural integrity of the car.
Also look at the lower areas of the windshield opening and back glass opening. These were made with drain holes in the bottom channel that plug and cause severe corrosion.
I like this body style a lot. This can turn some heads for a tiny fraction of that Chevelle, Camaro or GTO we would all love to own.
Nice ‘Vair. Good price. I know I should grab one of these soon.
yes, I think there were 2 gen.s (ora ‘face lift’). My mom’s mother had 1 on each side of the break (’64/5).
World famious supplier (50 yrs?) here in my area:
Clark’s
https://ssl.corvair.com/user-cgi/pages.cgi
Love Cheb for having Two different van models @ once. The Greenbriar and Chevy van.
Corvair was a bit ofa ‘division’ like today’s ‘bronco’ currently @ ford.
Lakewood (several station wagon), Greenbriar (3, 4 vans), 3 or 4 sedan/coup models…
It would be interesting to see the VIN to see where this one falls in the build order of the last year.
#5075
If anyone’s really interested in buying this Corvair, it’s in the Jacksonville area, about an hour away. Contact me and for a bucket of scallops and box of ammo, I could look at it for you. PM me here.
“……a bucket of scallops and box of ammo, I could look at it for you”
ok, you win the internet……!
bt
Hey BT, the further north in Florida you go, the further South you are. St. Mary’s is about a mile across the marsh from me –LOL
I’m also in Florida, about 30 minutes away from Middleburg (Florahome). I’ve had a couple of ‘Vairs, but none of the final generation. If it were 6 months from now I’d be all over this one, it looks great! I’m out of town a lot, but if Ablediver can’t go look at it for somebody, I can.
Fitch, et al, like myself found out in the day by owning one that even the 1st gen ‘Vairs had potential. I even spun mine around and airborne with a ’63 Monza coupe and did not buckle the rear end (though I DID lock up the engine). The guy in the back seat was so giddy, all he could say was “Let’s try that again!” With a siezed up engine that was a no-go.
My cousin, an SCCA race driver, spun a Corvair in the classic one car accident when the rear end broke free descending into a curve, at legal speeds. The issues of the rear axle were real, and are shared with every rear engined car ever made with swing axles. My understanding is that oversteer might have been worse on the Chevy because of the extreme 32%/68% front/rear weight distribution, the heavy six-cylinder engine, and some issues with where the swing axles were attached to the transaxle, which apparently exacerbated the issue. Anytime you mention “polar moment of inertia” and how it changes location depending on the velocity of the car, it’s above my understanding of physics.
It would be really interesting to know if the accident mortality per mile was higher overal in the Corvair than in other compact cars of the era. Unfortunately nobody recorded those data until the NHSTA was established in 1967, due to the influence of Ralph Nader’s book.
My guess is that the Corvair, over all, was not worse than the VW Beetle, Renault Dauphine, Nash Rambler, or other small cars of the era.
Except for the rare Fitch Sprint Corvair Corsa, I don’t think that I’ve ever seen a rear spoiler on a Corvair.
Looks like a modified early Camaro piece.
Yenko Stingers were probably the first to have them. Those deck lids were fiberglass, and racing versions had pop-up openings to get more fresh air into the engine compartment.
It’s not original paint, it’s at least a partial repaint, but I’d strongly guess a full repaint. The quickest and most common way to tell a respray is because the door strikers, door clasps, and other misc bits that were not painted from the factory, are painted here. Happens all the time. If a car is completely torn down and restored, you wouldn’t see this. Another surefire place to look is on the door pillar tags. Usually they just tape over these, and you can usually see at the edges where the paint comes into the tag because of imperfect masking. All kinds of ways to tell. It’s really hard to hide a respray except in top-tier restorations.
Nice car though, I love Corvairs and it looks great in this color.
Alright I live here in Jax and Ican look at it, but if you look at the couple of the last photos the hole in the body below the bottom door hinge. I like Vairs and this one caught my eye a couple of weeks ago. The driver fender bottom and the hole near the door hinge may be a problem.yes it’s a powerglide and the 110 was all they were building. The line was shut down and the 69 was built off the line in another section of the plant. Pretty sure they were just using up parts and filling the last orders. The pony cars were the big selling cars.
Guess where the die cast machine that produced the engine ended up? Waukegan, Illinois at the Johnson Motor plant. It was number 169. At the time it was the biggest die cast machine we had. They had to take a section of the “wall” that separated die cast area from the rest of the plant. It was dwarfed of course through the years and looked like a toy at the end of the Johnson Outboard run in 2000. Yep, I worked at both Johnson Outboards as well as AMC in Kenosha, WI, different times of course. Both companies failed because of lousy management and stupid supervision.
Are the vents at the base of the rear window for air flow for the A/C condenser?
That’s an aftermarket AC. The vents are for engine cooling but some AC systems put the condenser under those vents or up front in the front trunk area. Our installations on Covairs, VW Bugs, etc put the condensers up front so as not to impede engine cool air.
Interesting
I want to put electric a/c in my
VW SP2, but can’t figure out where to put the air intake
Over the years, I have owned exactly 3 Corvairs, all Monza’s. Two 1963’s and one 1968. The ’68 had a larger engine. All 3 had powerglides. All three were driven well. The ’68 I would have loved taking Nader for a ride in and make sure he had several changes of shorts. The Camaro may have had the moniker of Hugger, but it was the Corvair that should have had that name. That car went through anything. It was a true warrior and I loved all three. If you lived in the midwest, you didn’t need 4 wheel if you had a Corvair.
My high school car was a 65 Corvair Corsa with the four carbs replaced by a ram air with one two barrel carb. Even with the two barrel it out performed the stock 140 four carb engine. As a kid I couldn’t afford a four barrel carb but that car and I had a whole lot of fun. I found a 69 Trans-Am spoiler wing at a wrecking yard for $10 and after cutting 4” from the width it fit like it was made for it. My only issue with the car was that it dropped a valve seat from all of that extra heat. Yes it had a distinctive oversteer but once you got use to it and drove accordingly that car handled quite well. I’m passively looking for another one for a restorod project. An LS in the back seat is a long time dream. I was never a fan of the Crown kit that was popular for that min engine conversion because it placed the engine too far forward so the seats were pushed forward also. Nowadays I would use a Porsche transaxle or even use an F40 sidewinder trans.
I had a 1969 convertible, unfortunately very briefly, its suspension was entirely new for 1965 and fully independent, like a Corvette.
One of best handling American cars I have ever driven.