"There are many in who, in an alternate universe, are people who say that Detroit could have chosen to take the easy profits, as so many millions of people did in the post-war era, a time when the future was as bright as the sun, gas was cheap, interstates made travel easy and American cars were simple things, immense steel brutes that lit night into day with reflections off of their chrome horns. But this alternate universe would have allowed Detroit's spirit, the engineers who won the Second World War, to die away like so much garbage, and such would have been one of the greatest wastes of our time. And enough far-sighted men made sure that didn't happen to turn Detroit not just into a purveyor of land yachts, but into the place where the world's auto industry turned to. When Toyota engineers clean out GM dealerships of new models and promptly put them on boats to Japan, what else can one say other than imitation is the most sincere form of flattery?"
-- Brock Yates, American Iron and Carbon, 2005
At the end of World War II, so much of the opening statement of Brock Yates' now-iconic book was true that it actually scared many of the people who study history. After all, considering the awesome heights of modern America, how could it not be terrifying?
When one looks at where the industry's changes began, there is one place where many historians say it all began, and that was at the development of the first real small car made by Detroit, in the heights of its glory days. And that was 1958, when a short but sharp economic recession in America brought about, for its car industry, an alarming reality. Detroit didn't make small cars, they made cars that were big, bigger and enormous. Detroit's immunity from the oil shocks that had so shaken Western Europe after the Suez Crisis had never really allowed the idea of small cars to catch on in Detroit, but cars like the Volkswagen Beetle certainly did, and when Detroit made its collective decision to eradicate the imports, most decided that the small cars should eradicate the imports than drop out of sight as quickly as possible. But it didn't quite work out that way....
The American small cars that arrived on the market in 1960 comprised of three offerings from the Big Three Detroit makers. The Plymouth Valiant was the most conventional in design and marketing, and the Ford Falcon, while mechanically fairly similar in design, was marketed as just bare-bones transportation - a fact that ensured the Falcon got nowhere under the leadership of Ford's "Whiz Kid", Robert McNamara, one of the boys who followed Henry Ford II into the company in the post-war era. The AMC Rambler American also followed this category, and while a visionary George Romney was, The Rambler was hardly a success, and like the Falcon and Valiant, it was an unoriginal design - straight-six engine driving through a three or four speed transmission to the rear wheels, the wheels using the same double A-arm front suspension and live axle rear as most Detroit cars in the post-war era did. They were, in effect, six-cylinder small cars with the same designs in many ways as their bigger cousins. This was a good idea from a reliability point of view - and true to form, reliability was a strong suit for all of the early 1960s compacts. But it was also true of cars like the Volkswagen Beetle, and the Detroit offerings, while being far quicker and roomier than the Beetle, and not having the Volkswagen's handling quirks, were complete failures at expelling the German-built machine. The Valiant was ingenious in its use of torsion bars in the front suspension and aluminum castings, but it was effectively a still very conservative design - its engine, for example, had been designed to have its engine block be made of aluminum, but Chrysler's conservatism mandated it be made of cast iron, a decision that improved durability but came at a considerable weight penalty.
But General Motors, with its Corvair, was a totally different story altogether....
"Head office was, as usual, penny-pinching on the development of new cars, but Ed [Cole] and Bunkie [Kundsen] wouldn't budge. Not an inch. He made it clear that if the Corvair was going to truly seduce American car buyers, it had to be the best-designed and best-built possible. He nearly took a swing at a guy who demanded he delete the rear stabilizer bar to save costs, stating that paying the victims of Corvair crashes was cheaper than making the car right in the first place. Ed made sure everybody across the divisions heard of that story, and it pissed off enough of the board that Ed got his way. The board wanted his hide for a while, but the Corvair's success stopped that idea. By the time the story stopped circulating, one wondered if the offending accountant was still employed at General Motors."
-- John DeLorean, On A Clear Day You Can See General Motors, 1980
The Corvair was not like anything General Motors had ever made before. Rear-engined and powered by an air-cooled flat-six engine, the Corvair used independent suspension on all four corners, and most notably, disc brakes on all four corners. Ed's old friend Zora Arkus-Duntov was a big player here, advocating that the disc brakes and stabilizer bars on both ends be used on all Corvairs. It proved to be a good decision, as the Corvair rapidly established itself a reputation for beautiful handling, though its original 2.3-liter flat-6 engine only made 80 horsepower, and thus acceleration was not exactly fast. A unibody car (a first for GM, but not for Detroit by any means), Cole's advocating of better body fabrication, echoed by Pontiac division rising star John DeLorean, was also worth the work. The Corvair, introduced in the fall of 1959, would go on to change Detroit forever.
A 1961 Chevrolet Corvair Lakewood station wagon
The Corvair was a show-stopper, and both the motoring press and the world at large rapidly fell in love with it. "As fine a handling automobile as any we have driven in a long time." wrote Road and Track in their February 1960 issue, and that fact came up early and often. The Corvair's independent suspension and stiff body fabrication, as well as its rapid steering and excellent brakes, gave the car the feel of an oversized go-kart, a feel that became one of the Corvair's greatest selling points - after all, if you have to drive a small car instead of a big one, why not make the small one a blast to drive?
The Corvair scored enormously in the marketplace right from the start. Despite a strike at US Steel that slowed early production, over 420,000 Corvairs moved out in their first year, and with the introduction of the amazing Monza coupe, as well as the Lakeview and Greenbrier station wagons and the Corvair pickup trucks, sales of the car soared to nearly 750,000 by 1962. The car was such a big seller that all of its rivals were quick to begin working to improve their entrants, in Ford's case made easier when McNamara headed off to be President Kennedy's Secretary of Defense in 1961. But the biggest surprise at GM was that the disc brakes first pioneered on the Corvette and then proved possible for mass production by the Corvair proved to be both easier to maintain and more efficient than the drum brakes used on so many cars. It didn't take long for disc brakes to spread across much of the GM range.
"The Fourteenth Floor was real pissed about the Corvair at first, because it did such a wonderful job that it actually began grabbing sales from the bigger cars at GM, and the suits that ran the place was smoking mad about that, because it made the company less money than the big cars. The big cars went so far as to propose to push the Corvair down the order, but by the time they were in a position to do that, Ford rolled out the Mustang, and the idea went to bed for good. If anything, after the Mustang, they needed the faster Corvair more than ever before."
-- Pete Estes, in an interview with Car and Driver in 1977
What the Corvair did, above all else, was prove that engineers like Cole, Arkus-Duntov and Knudsen had said for many years - if you build it better, it sells better, and there was a real benefit to embracing technology. It was a beginning, and a beginning that it wouldn't be long before all of Detroit learned, and all would take advantage of....
-- Brock Yates, American Iron and Carbon, 2005
At the end of World War II, so much of the opening statement of Brock Yates' now-iconic book was true that it actually scared many of the people who study history. After all, considering the awesome heights of modern America, how could it not be terrifying?
When one looks at where the industry's changes began, there is one place where many historians say it all began, and that was at the development of the first real small car made by Detroit, in the heights of its glory days. And that was 1958, when a short but sharp economic recession in America brought about, for its car industry, an alarming reality. Detroit didn't make small cars, they made cars that were big, bigger and enormous. Detroit's immunity from the oil shocks that had so shaken Western Europe after the Suez Crisis had never really allowed the idea of small cars to catch on in Detroit, but cars like the Volkswagen Beetle certainly did, and when Detroit made its collective decision to eradicate the imports, most decided that the small cars should eradicate the imports than drop out of sight as quickly as possible. But it didn't quite work out that way....
The American small cars that arrived on the market in 1960 comprised of three offerings from the Big Three Detroit makers. The Plymouth Valiant was the most conventional in design and marketing, and the Ford Falcon, while mechanically fairly similar in design, was marketed as just bare-bones transportation - a fact that ensured the Falcon got nowhere under the leadership of Ford's "Whiz Kid", Robert McNamara, one of the boys who followed Henry Ford II into the company in the post-war era. The AMC Rambler American also followed this category, and while a visionary George Romney was, The Rambler was hardly a success, and like the Falcon and Valiant, it was an unoriginal design - straight-six engine driving through a three or four speed transmission to the rear wheels, the wheels using the same double A-arm front suspension and live axle rear as most Detroit cars in the post-war era did. They were, in effect, six-cylinder small cars with the same designs in many ways as their bigger cousins. This was a good idea from a reliability point of view - and true to form, reliability was a strong suit for all of the early 1960s compacts. But it was also true of cars like the Volkswagen Beetle, and the Detroit offerings, while being far quicker and roomier than the Beetle, and not having the Volkswagen's handling quirks, were complete failures at expelling the German-built machine. The Valiant was ingenious in its use of torsion bars in the front suspension and aluminum castings, but it was effectively a still very conservative design - its engine, for example, had been designed to have its engine block be made of aluminum, but Chrysler's conservatism mandated it be made of cast iron, a decision that improved durability but came at a considerable weight penalty.
But General Motors, with its Corvair, was a totally different story altogether....
"Head office was, as usual, penny-pinching on the development of new cars, but Ed [Cole] and Bunkie [Kundsen] wouldn't budge. Not an inch. He made it clear that if the Corvair was going to truly seduce American car buyers, it had to be the best-designed and best-built possible. He nearly took a swing at a guy who demanded he delete the rear stabilizer bar to save costs, stating that paying the victims of Corvair crashes was cheaper than making the car right in the first place. Ed made sure everybody across the divisions heard of that story, and it pissed off enough of the board that Ed got his way. The board wanted his hide for a while, but the Corvair's success stopped that idea. By the time the story stopped circulating, one wondered if the offending accountant was still employed at General Motors."
-- John DeLorean, On A Clear Day You Can See General Motors, 1980
The Corvair was not like anything General Motors had ever made before. Rear-engined and powered by an air-cooled flat-six engine, the Corvair used independent suspension on all four corners, and most notably, disc brakes on all four corners. Ed's old friend Zora Arkus-Duntov was a big player here, advocating that the disc brakes and stabilizer bars on both ends be used on all Corvairs. It proved to be a good decision, as the Corvair rapidly established itself a reputation for beautiful handling, though its original 2.3-liter flat-6 engine only made 80 horsepower, and thus acceleration was not exactly fast. A unibody car (a first for GM, but not for Detroit by any means), Cole's advocating of better body fabrication, echoed by Pontiac division rising star John DeLorean, was also worth the work. The Corvair, introduced in the fall of 1959, would go on to change Detroit forever.
A 1961 Chevrolet Corvair Lakewood station wagon
The Corvair was a show-stopper, and both the motoring press and the world at large rapidly fell in love with it. "As fine a handling automobile as any we have driven in a long time." wrote Road and Track in their February 1960 issue, and that fact came up early and often. The Corvair's independent suspension and stiff body fabrication, as well as its rapid steering and excellent brakes, gave the car the feel of an oversized go-kart, a feel that became one of the Corvair's greatest selling points - after all, if you have to drive a small car instead of a big one, why not make the small one a blast to drive?
The Corvair scored enormously in the marketplace right from the start. Despite a strike at US Steel that slowed early production, over 420,000 Corvairs moved out in their first year, and with the introduction of the amazing Monza coupe, as well as the Lakeview and Greenbrier station wagons and the Corvair pickup trucks, sales of the car soared to nearly 750,000 by 1962. The car was such a big seller that all of its rivals were quick to begin working to improve their entrants, in Ford's case made easier when McNamara headed off to be President Kennedy's Secretary of Defense in 1961. But the biggest surprise at GM was that the disc brakes first pioneered on the Corvette and then proved possible for mass production by the Corvair proved to be both easier to maintain and more efficient than the drum brakes used on so many cars. It didn't take long for disc brakes to spread across much of the GM range.
"The Fourteenth Floor was real pissed about the Corvair at first, because it did such a wonderful job that it actually began grabbing sales from the bigger cars at GM, and the suits that ran the place was smoking mad about that, because it made the company less money than the big cars. The big cars went so far as to propose to push the Corvair down the order, but by the time they were in a position to do that, Ford rolled out the Mustang, and the idea went to bed for good. If anything, after the Mustang, they needed the faster Corvair more than ever before."
-- Pete Estes, in an interview with Car and Driver in 1977
What the Corvair did, above all else, was prove that engineers like Cole, Arkus-Duntov and Knudsen had said for many years - if you build it better, it sells better, and there was a real benefit to embracing technology. It was a beginning, and a beginning that it wouldn't be long before all of Detroit learned, and all would take advantage of....
