Should we trade our Jeeps for Corvairs?

This is kind of a fun Chevy propoganda film for the Corvair. Off roading starts about the 2:20 mark.

Edited by smfulle - 25 Nov. 2018 at 7:45pm

My friends mom had a solid blue 61 Corvair Lakewood Wagon that she drove us to the YMCA every week for a couple of years back in the mid 60. It was ten miles each way and we survived & never got stuck in the snow either. I also had a buddy that had a 1965 4 door sedan Corvair that we safely logged many many miles in. It was great in the snow for sure & we would also run it in the field to go to his camp as well and never flipped it. I think Mr. Nader was a bit rough on these little cars. It was not intended to be a sports car but rather an economical grocery getter. I also drove a 1988 Suzuki Samurai for four years & survived that too be cause it was driven the way it was intended to be driven. They said the Samurai would almost flip over in the driveway!
Maybe if all the distracted Americans put down their coffee, burgers, make up, newspapers and cell phones and drove their vehicles the way the designers intended, the lawyers like Nader would be a thing of the past rather than these innovative designed modes of transportation.
Our beloved CJs can get you in bad spots too if you let them but we learn to adapt and drive them everywhere don't we. Just ask Jpet, Bob W, JeepFever and grandpasjeep.
IMHO

P.S. with all that said I still don't think I would trade my CJ2A for a Corvair!

Edited by 3-48s - 25 Nov. 2018 at 7:25pm

My dad had a 50s-something VW Beetle that he thought was just about unstoppable in snow.  Tall, skinny snow tires with all of the weight on the rear drive wheels isn't a bad recipe for mud or snow.

I had a Covair in high school.  Two speed automatic.  No way I was going to get in trouble, or at least my dad thought so.  Come home after playing in the snow with both right side rims bent where I had slide sideways at high speed and hit a curb.  It didn't flip, but it tipped.  Great handling car.   That was before I met my first jeep.  Great fun in snow.  

The problem is that GM just didn't do enough marketing for the neat PTO attachment and all the cool farm tool attachments they designed for the Corvair.

RICKG wrote: I musta missed the part in the vid with one front wheel up on the boulder and the other in the air..

Edited by smfulle - 26 Nov. 2018 at 6:27pm

My second car ever was a little $100.00 '63 Corvair Monza 900 coupe....this being after I managed to grenade the 265 in my $75.00 '57 Chevy. The 'Vair served us well as a high school dating car and later to bring home our first born from the hospital. In the summer of '78 I put 700 miles a weekend commuting home from a job in Denver...we even got rear ended by an unmarked Aurora PD car on I 70 while he was chasing a suspect in a Vega. Sad... I couldn't even keep up with a Vega.

And you can thank them for those cute little, free flowing "Turbo mufflers" that everybody has been using for years......the Turbocharged Monza is where they came from.

I was a Chevy line mechanic during the Corvair's hey-day. All that Unsafe At Any Speed nonsense was due to people not reading the manual. Front tire air pressure was 15psi while the rears were 26psi. Where it became unsafe was when people rotated the tires but never thought to readjust the air pressures. Now you've got 15psi on the rears and 26psi on the front. Any wonder the rear engined car rolled when taking a curve at speed? The front would oversteer and the soft rear tires folded under the wheel and over she went. But things got much "safer" when the Vega and Pinto came along.