It’s not often that a car etches its name into American history, especially one with an unspectacular design that was on the market only for a decade.
But then the Chevy Corvair was an unusual automobile. And few remember it now, 50 years after it was introduced, for the typical reasons you’d remember a car.
The Corvair’s legacy is one of a lack of safety, first and foremost. The car was the subject of the opening chapter of Ralph Nader’s landmark 1965 book, “Unsafe at Any Speed.” The consequent outcry over car safety marked an inflection in the history of American automobiles and, as pointed out in a retrospective look at the Corvair in Wisconsin’s Oshkosh Northwestern, it ultimately led to stricter regulation and far safer automobiles.
The main safety issues for the Corvair involved handling (drivers had the tendency to lose control while cornering), and its steering column (as with many cars of that era, the column could impale the driver in front-end collisions).
As a result of the concerns, Congress passed a landmark bill in 1966, and cars kept on getting safer, thanks to seat belt laws, airbags and other innovations. Fast-forward to the modern era, and you have fewer U.S. traffic fatalities in 2009 than in 1950, despite a population more than twice as large.
The movement, experts say, all started with the Chevy’s sporty compact sedan, which first sold for less than $2,000.
“If not for the Corvair, it’s questionable if there would have been a 1966 National Traffic and Motor Vehicle Safety Act,” Clarence Ditlow, executive director of the Nader-founded Center for Auto Safety, told the Oshkosh newspaper. “Under the safety act, there are over 50 different motor vehicle safety standards today, including airbags, laminated windshields which prevented ejections in crashes, seat belts and the dual braking system.”
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All of the safety problems had been fixed by the time of the Corvair’s demise.. Nader boosted his career and destroyed our American version of a rear engine flat six Porsche. Like Nixon, GM tried to smear the whisle-blower and it blew up in their face. BTW I built a modified mid-engine V-8, 1966 Corvair that was very stable at 120 mph and would blow away just about any foreign competion, curves or straightaway.