GM’s Super Beetle

One of the most unusual cars ever mass-produced by an American car company is arguably the Chevrolet Corvair. It had a rear-mounted, air-cooled engine, very similar to the VW Beetle’s but instead of four cylinders, the Corvair had six. It had two rather than just one carburetor and four were available in high-performance Corsa variants. An even higher-performance Spyder version was available that had a turbocharger – and 150 horsepower.

It was a kind of Super Beetle years before VW offered one (and when it did, it didn’t have a six or multiple carbs).

There was another thing the Corvair had that the Beetle had less of. Space. The Beetle was called that in part because it was such a little car. It had very little room inside, especially in the rear. It was possible to sit back there. It just wasn’t easy to get back there or especially comfortable to sit back there. Also, when four people were inside a Beetle, the added weight severely taxed the air-cooled four’s capabilities. To say it was a little underpowered is something like saying the traffic in DC is a little heavy.  (I used to drive a Beetle – a Super Beetle – in DC traffic back in the ’90s and it was ok, provided I was by myself. With others along for the ride, it was an experience trying to merge with traffic running 75 MPH on the DC Beltway.)

The Corvair had room – and power. I can attest to this, because I also drove one in the same DC traffic, back in the ’90s – when I owned a ’64 Monza, which is a Corvair with the optional, 110 horsepower version of the air-cooled six. It had enough power to merge with – and to keep up with – DC-area traffic. It could hold 75 MPH, which was very close to the Beetle’s top speed. It also had a much more spacious interior, including the backseat area. The low-back front seats (later out-regulated by the federal government in the name of saaaaaaaaaaaaaafety) were easily folded forward and it was easy for passengers to get in – and out of the Corvair.

Even more so if you got the sedan. The Corvair was available with two or four doors. The four door was a family-viable car. The two-door-only Beetle was fundamentally a commuter car.

The Corvair had another thing that was – in my experience – better than what the Beetle had: An effective heater – and much more effective ventilation. My Super Beetle’s heater produced a little bit of warmth. Enough to keep you from freezing, if you wore enough clothes.

The Corvair’s heater was toasty.

It had automatic/thermostatically controlled baffles that controlled the airflow over the engine, which served both to keep the engine cool and (when you needed it) the car’s interior warm. The converse – a thing not often discussed when this subject comes up – is that when you wanted to cool down the interior, the Corvair’s system of vents was much better than the Beetle’s. In addition to the wing-vent quarter windows that both cars had, which could be opened to direct air from outside into the cabin, the Corvair (like other GM cars of the era) had under-dash knobs you could pull that opened ducts that admitted lots of air from the outside into the car. You could close the wing vents (which tamped down the noise inside the car) and open these ducts and be cool inside the car. It was poor man’s AC – and it worked, too. I got to work in downtown DC in my ‘Vair wearing a dress shirt without pit stains under my arms.

So why did the Corvair fail?

Well, to begin with, it didn’t. It just didn’t do as well as GM had hoped it would. And it didn’t do as well as the Beetle did. GM sold several hundred thousand of them, which isn’t bad. But VW sold millions of Beetles. Why the disparity? Several reasons come to mind, the first being that the Corvair was out of place in the GM family. It was a kind of red-headed stepchild. It was the only air-cooled and the only rear-engined car GM had in its lineup. It was weird, in other words – especially in the eyes of most GM buyers. VW, on the other hand, only sold air-cooled cars (at the time) and people who came to a VW dealer came there specifically because they were interested in a weird little car with an air-cooled engine.

Chevy dealers had to explain to customers what the Corvair was and had to persuade them that the weird layout was desirable. That’s a harder sell, usually. And so it proved to be.

The other thing was bad timing. The Corvair – which was introduced in 1959 as a new-for-1960 model – debuted just in time for the Mustang and its emulators (such as Camaro and Firebird) to eclipse its appeal as a sporty car because even though it was sporty (it has been described, accurately, as a kind of poor man’s Porsche) it could never match the performance of cars like the Mustang and its emulators. At the same time, it cost more than the Beetle, which never tried to be sporty and so didn’t have to worry about competing with cars like the Mustang.

Ralph Nader didn’t help, of course. But he only hammered the nails in the Corvair’s coffin with his hit-book, Unsafe at Any Speed. More than anything else, arguably, the Corvair was the victim of bad timing and bad marketing. It is very possible that had it been introduced in the early 1970s, in time for the gas lines and gas price hikes – when sporty and economical was very much back in style – it might have put the nails in the Beetle’s coffin.

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