<VV> 1960 Horn Slots

[peter koehler]

The three vertical slots in the lower valance below the 
front bumper of early 1960's can be seen in most of the 
pre-production advertising photos and in the service 
manuals. Seeing them on an actual car is a much rarer 
sight. Only four "horn-slot" cars are known to exist. The 
green one pictured in the previous post is #428 off the 
line at Willow Run, Michigan and it is the newest Corvair 
with that feature. Two other horn-slot cars reside in 
Michigan (#375 and #407) and the oldest known surviving 
Corvair is #272 that lives in Ontario, Canada. All four of 
these cars were built within several days of each other. 
All of this happened before the first week of production 
at Willow Run was completed.

The story goes that the engineers found that the horn 
slots allowed road dirt and debris to collect in the horns 
and actually render them inoperative. The design was 
supposed to let the horns work better. The location of the 
horns was moved up under the headlight buckets and away 
from the lower valance panel. Even the cars with the horn 
slots have the re-located horns. GM was just using up 
metal stampings that they ran before the change in the 
horn location. Why waste good front stampings?

If you do get a chance to check out a real horn-slot '60 
look at the right hand side of the lower valance. There 
are three similar indentations in the panel to make the 
slots on the left side. Perhaps the plan was to open these 
slots up if a car was built with dual horns? I dunno. What 
do you think? - Caveman Pete