Chevy Corvair an opertunity lost

[autogyro]

http://www.youtube.com/watch?feature=pl ... F-8a6B8Ljk

The Corvair could have been the saviour of the American auto industry in the face of foreign imports and the change over to ugly unsafe fuel wasting blobby 4 by 4s.
Americans could be driving economic compact sensible cars today.

The only real criticism was the rear suspension.
This was very similar to the rear suspension on the British Triumph Spitfire and GT6.
These triumphs were raced for many years and I used one once on a rally and was caught out by the sudden rear end break away caused by the rear suspension design. Much the same as the Corvair.
There was a simple and effective conversion for this suspension from a company I think called SPQR or something similar.
Just think, the American auto industry might be totaly different today if they had found this fix.

[Tommy Cookers]

the suspension fix was presumably a Z bar (the opposite of an ARB) aka 'camber compensator'
(Triumph's various alleviations of their suspension problems all reduced or cancelled the rear roll stiffness in other ways)

GM required the front tyres to be as softly inflated as possible, and the rears as hard, to promote understeer
most of the roadholding-related accidents were due to the tyres being rotated without the correct pressures being reinstated
Nader went after GM with little success ?, till they tried to blackmail him (or worse)

there was a turbo Corvair which used ADI, all from the Chevy dealers
I won't mention aviation applications

the real question must be, why didn't GM try conventional-technology for the sub-compact ?
(ok, later they did, and messed that up as well (the Vega) because they couldn't stay conventional)
lots of people in the 50s bought the (then unknown) Volvo (because it was faultless in design and construction)
so there was no need for GM to emulate the (unconventional) VW anyway

in those days John Z DeLorean was tipped as a future head of GM