<VV> The demise of the American Car - Limited Corvair

[Grant Young]

There in an article in our St. Pete Times today that is borrowed from the NY Times News Service. It is about how American car manufacturers inadvertently opened the US to imports by producing three of the worst cars ever - the Vega, Gremlin, and Pinto all at once. Seems that in 1968 only 1 in 10 cars sold were imports. The article starts with a slam on the Corvair by saying "The Chairman of GM announced...that the XP-887 (Vega) would be about a foot shorter than GM's smallest offering...the Chevrolet Corvair. And it would, no doubt, be better than that star-crossed and litigation-plagued import fighter from a decade earlier."

It goes on to say that "instead of being developed by the engineering staff of a single brand, the Vega was designed by the corporate engineering staff under the direction of Edward M. Cole...It was then handed to Chevrolet's managers (headed by John DeLorean) to sell." Seems the major glitch was the engine "that looked like it had been taken off a 1920's farm tractor...."

The gist of the article is that those three cars were so bad that it essentially opened the market flood gates to the much better imports and it was all down hill from there.

Grant