Me & My Car: Orinda owner’s ’64 Corvair Spyder reminder of first vehicle
The Chevy model's sales were great till Ralph Nader's book was published, then they never recovered despite a study's vindication.
There were two generations of the Chevrolet Corvair, the first from 1960 to 1964 and the second from 1965 to 1969. Ed Cole, a 44-year career executive with General Motors Corp. (including as the company’s president and CEO from 1967 until retiring in 1974) has been credited for Corvair models. He is considered one of the most innovative leaders in the automotive industry’s history.
In the early 1960s, Volkswagen sales were increasing at a rapid rate, which motivated new thinking at General Motors. In 1949, their first year in this country, VW sold only two cars in America, but by 1970 VW’s U.S. sales topped 570,000. Cole saw the increase and noted that the Big Three (GM, Ford and Chrysler) didn’t offer small, economical cars until 1959-1960. And those cars were really just scaled-down versions of traditional big American cars.
In 1956 Cole was named Chevrolet’s general manager and was very involved with the design and development of the rear-engine Corvair. Indidentally, the name Corvair combines the names of the Corvette and Bel Air, both very successful models under Cole’s leadership.
The Corvair engine was an overhead-valve aluminum, air-cooled 145-cubic-inch flat-six (later enlarged to 164 cubic inches) rated at 80 horsepower. There were six body styles: convertible, coupe, sedan, wagon, van and pickup truck. It was offered with three- or four-speed manual transmissions or the two-speed Powerglide automatic transmission.
It’s a small car, weighing about 2,300 pounds and sitting on a 108-inch wheelbase. Corvair won Motor Trend magazine’s Car of the Year award in 1960 and sold more than 1,677,000 models in its first six years.
Then we witnessed the power of the pen. Ralph Nader wrote the book called “Unsafe at Any Speed,” which became a nonfiction best-seller in 1966. How influential was his book? Well, for the first six years of the Corvair before Nader’s book was published, the average annual sales were 279,576, and for the final four years after the book was published the average annual sales for the Corvair were 31,706.
As you can imagine, lawsuits followed, and in 1972 a government study vindicated the Corvair, stating that it was just as safe and any other car, but, of course by that time the damage was done, with the last Corvair being built in 1969. Nader became a household name, though, went on to promote other consumer causes and ran for president of the United States four times.
This issue’s featured car is a first-generation Corvair, a 1964 Spyder coupe belonging to Orinda resident Steven Schnier. Schnier, like many of us, has a great fondness for his first car, and he regrets letting it slip away. In June 1963, the day after his high school graduation, he acquired a new, 150-horsepower Palomar Red Corvair Spyder with black bucket seats and a four-speed manual transmission.
“During our years together, I made some changes,” Schnier wrote, “some for the better and some for the worse and some just because they seemed, to a 17-year-old kid, like good ideas at the time.
“As an example of adolescent foolishness, I let my 1963 Corvair get away, as I sold her and converted the proceeds into a 1963 Chevrolet Impala SS, a Triumph motorcycle (Tiger 90) and a Rickenbacker 12-string semi-hollow-body electric guitar. Many more years later, in the early 1990s, I experienced a remission of the Corvair bug. I went looking for a Spyder coupe and found a 1964 coupe for sale in Michigan. It’s almost identical to the one that had seen me through college in the mid-1960s.
“As with most intimate relationships, my bond with my Corvair was seriously tested at least once. As I traveled south on Highway 99, with Bakersfield in my rear-view mirror, I began the ascent up the ‘Grapevine.’ I thought that if I could just make it over the hill, I could coast to the friendly freeways of Southern California. But we fell short, and I limped into a ramshackle gas station in Lebec. It was manned by a pair of fellows who a few years later may well have been cast for roles in (the film) ‘Deliverance.’ ”
There was more adventure for Schnier when he went to retrieve his Corvair.
“It included a lengthy Greyhound bus trip to Gorman, and a motorcycle ride courtesy of the Hell’s Angels,” he said.
Recently, Schnier met Ralph Nader at a speaking engagement in Berkeley.
“Mr. Nader and I exchanged gentlemanly polite greetings, our encounter facilitated by my purchase of an autographed, hardcover copy of ‘Unsafe at Any Speed.’ ”
There may be some disagreement between the two as to the conclusions of that book. So now, this 1964 Corvair Spyder sits in a garage, but to Schnier it’s a rolling scrapbook of his past adventures with his first car, the 1963 model, the car that took him through high school, college and law school and the one he drove on his first date. He’s not letting this Corvair slip way.
Have an interesting vehicle? Contact David Krumboltz at MOBopoly@yahoo.com. To view more photos of this and other issues’ vehicles or to read more of Dave’s columns, visit mercurynews.com/author/david-krumboltz.