Unsafe at Any Speed. If a fellow UK car nut has heard of the Chevrolet Corvair at all, it’s because of the infamous book of that title, as written by attorney, consumer advocate and one-time US presidential candidate Ralph Nader. Published in 1965, it documented the safety failings, both active and passive, of many a car on sale in the US at the time, besides berating the industry for spending a near-invisible 23 cents per car on safety, and $700 on the annual model year refresh. It was to the Corvair, the book’s first chapter almost entirely devoted to this budget Chevrolet, that much of Nader’s justly flung mud stuck.
When your reporter chose to buy one of these cars, towing it across much of North America before it was safely shipped across the Atlantic to Southampton docks, the vehicle in question proved unsafe at a very low speed indeed when it fell off my trailer onto the quayside, a panel-sculpting moment of considerable emotional pain. But I’m getting ahead of myself.
About 15 years ago, I had a curious hankering for a car with an air-cooled 2.7-litre flat-six. Not a certain German machine, though I have owned a water-cooled variant of the species, but an American one that, like a mid-1970s 911, features said 2.7-litre air-cooled flat-six located an ill-advised distance astern of its occupants. I don’t know where the idea to actually own a Corvair sprang from, but the more I read about this American compact, the more I was fascinated by it. More than that, I thought the two-door facelift coupé version looked terrific, with its subtle Coke bottle body, recessed tail panel, slender pillars and windows that dropped to provide a pillarless look. It’s so low, too.
