In 1965, a young lawyer named Ralph Nader
published a book titled Unsafe at Any Speed,
which was a harsh critique of automotive safety.
One chapter of the book was dedicated to
the curious handling of the Chevy Corvair.
Nader called it "the one-car accident."
So I've arranged to drive a Corvair, and
not just any Corvair, but one owned by Ralph Nader himself.
I've rented a wide open runway,
and I'm here to find out, essentially,
will the Corvair kill me? (wheels screeching)
(new age trance music)
The Corvair is the most controversial car in history.
I've always been fascinated with it,
so I've put together the pieces to draw my own conclusion.
It was designed in the '50s during a time
when the average American car lumbered down the road
carrying two tons of steel and rubber,
and the postwar exuberance was still in full swing.
And with a price of less than 2,000 bucks
it was cheap, and provided families
with an alternative form of transportation.
At the time, General Motors sold roughly half
of the new cars bought each year, so it was flush with cash.
And it used those resources to rethink the automobile.
Now unlike every other American car
that carried a water-cooled engine in front,
Corvair's engine resided in the trunk.
And since the engine was cooled by a fan,
it didn't need a radiator.
The goal was simplicity and function over form.
Chevy had big plans for the car.
In Nader's book, he called the Corvair
"the one-car accident."
He wrote that a design flaw in the rear suspension
made the car likely to flip over
when driven in abrupt maneuvers like say,
avoiding a ball that suddenly rolled into the street.
The book was a bestseller, and has been
linked to the Corvair ever since.
For Ralph Nader it was very successful, yes.
- [Larry] Say hello to Peter Koehler.
Now I love listening to Koehler;
he's obviously so emotionally invested in the car.
When you hear him talk about Nader,
there's almost a little tinge of anger in his voice.
He presented the work in a fashion that sold books.
And got people's attention; I think that's probably
the best way to put it, okay?
- [Larry] Pete's a former GM engineer,
and a Corvair fanatic.
I've got 15 Corvairs, I believe.
We're supposed to be a group of rugged individuals.
We have Corvairs because they're different:
they're not Camaros; they're not Impalas;
they're not Corvettes.
But I want to be unique in a unique group of people.
- [Larry] I've always wondered if Nader's claims were fair.
In car circles, Nader is credited
with effectively killing Chevy small car.
Brock Yates, the longtime Car & Driver columnist,
regularly vilified Nader.
Yates lumped Nader into a group
he referred to as "the safety Nazis."
Now to me, a car-obsessed adolescent
born five years after Nader's famous book,
Yates' diatribes and stunts were gospel.
Nader's book helped usher in
a host of emissions and safety regulations
that hobbled vehicle performance.
When I finally got around to actually
reading Nader's book in the 1990s however,
the car companies had long since
engineered around the regulations.
Horsepower was back and climbing.
The death rate since 1965 had dramatically dropped,
and our cars are now far safer and cleaner.
This is a 1962 Monza four-door sedan
that I purchased from Ralph Nader.
Having Ralph Nader's Corvair, trying to get the story out
that this is still a viable vehicle,
it's a hobby, we enjoy it; I haven't been killed yet.
I don't have any grass stains on the roof of my Corvairs.
It's not as unsafe perhaps as the book made it look.
So I bought it.
- [Larry] The first lawsuit arrived in 1961.
Now, GM's lawyers wanted to settle,
but Ed Cole, who is credited with designing the car,
and Frank Winchell, GM's head of R&D,
convinced GM's board to fight, so GM enlisted
the entire research and development department
to prepare a defense.
Their rationale was it's an easy case to try
because it's different.
Our feeling was, making things different
is what we do as engineers!
So we didn't find anything bad about that at all.
- [Larry] This is retired Chevrolet engineer
Jim Musser; he spent his career
in the research and development department at GM,
and he worked on improving the Corvair
and preparing the defense for the court cases.
No one knows the Corvair better than Jim.
The claim against the Corvair was,
it was defective design.
So that meant two things:
one is that every Corvair was defective.
And two, it was a slight on General Motors' engineering,
that they would engineer a defective car.
We felt it had to be vigorously defended, which we did.
The Corvair doesn't automatically roll over and die.
The Corvair doesn't cause you to be a bad driver.
If you know what you're doing, you can drive the Corvair.
If you know what you're doing,
you can drive a Volkswagen Beetle, or a 356 Porsche,
which all had the same suspension system
that Ralph said was "unsafe at any speed."
That really isn't true.
The problem was too much weight transfer at the rear,
for two reasons.
One, a swing axle has a high roll center,
which contributes to weight transfer.
Because of the weight back there,
the coil springs were stiffer,
and so that added to the roll stiffness as well.
So fully 80% of the weight transfer in cornering
was on the rear tires, and that's what caused it
to oversteer and eventually go out of control.
- [Larry] Okay, what these guys are trying to say
is that the Corvair wasn't flawed as much as
it was designed with a unique purpose, and that was economy.
Its rear suspension was simple, so it could be made cheaper.
And consequently it sold for less than $2,000.
The idea here was a family car.
They were entered in the Mobil Gas economy runs back then;
they got over 30 miles to the gallon.
They won their class several years.
That's how Ed Cole envisioned the car,
just a bread and butter, get to the grocery store and back,
economical, cheap to buy, cheap to maintain, kind of a car.
The way it's operated is different from any other car,
and if you don't know the differences,
you could cause yourself to be a in a situation
that's hard to recover from.
Now is that the fault of the engineer?
Was that the fault of the company
that built the car and sold it?
Or is that just somebody forgot to follow the rules?
- [Larry] Now before you call me reckless,
you should know a few things.
I've been racing and testing cars for over 20 years.
I've been to numerous racing schools; driving is my life,
and while I'm not a professional race car driver,
I know what I'm doing behind the wheel.
I've also rented the perfect facility for these maneuvers.
It's an airport, with hugely wide runways,
nothing to hit, and plenty of runoff.
- [Peter] I've known Larry for a while;
I trust his ability to drive.
My major thing is, Larry knows how to go fast,
and Larry knows when to say, "Whoa."
- [Larry] But even still, I'm nervous.
I start slowly; I turn the wheel.
I'm unsure what's going to happen.
In the back of my mind is that crash footage
that's all over YouTube, that shows the thing
spinning out and rolling.
I don't know how strong this roof is,
but it's nowhere near as stout as the roofs on today's cars.
I've got a helmet; I've got a lap belt;
but I've also got three kids at home.
The way cars can be rolled easily,
many cars can be rolled easily,
is to make a hard turn in one direction
to get the body to roll as far as it will go,
and then suddenly turn it in the opposite direction
to add momentum to that roll.
- [Larry] As I start picking up speed,
cutting the wheel back and forth,
I can feel the rear end get light.
(tires squealing)
When you're racing, a car that oversteers like this
is a huge benefit.
You can use both ends of the car
to navigate turns quicker than you would otherwise.
I like it; it's fun.
(instrumental rock music)
(tires squealing)
The swings get wider; they happen more abruptly.
It doesn't feel like it's catching;
it feels like it's gradual, almost graceful in its moves.
But again, I've got a perfect situation here:
a perfectly maintained car.
The car does what it is designed to do.
The question is, is that worse than the alternative?
Say another driver does the same thing
in a 1960 Chevrolet Impala.
Now the Impala probably wouldn't spin,
but instead it wouldn't make the turn at all.
Now since every situation is unique,
it's impossible to say which outcome is preferable.
Between the two however, the Corvair probably has
the better chance of avoiding that ball
that rolled into the street.
I think of the Corvair as a sacrificial lamb
that motivated Nader to write a book that got the industry
to make some initially painful changes
that ultimately proved necessary.
Every car has a story, the Corvair's
just happens to be more interesting than most.