Yahoo Autos Junkyard Gem: 1968 Chevrolet Corvair 500 Sport Coupe
Quick, what's the most controversial American car ever built? Was it the Edsel? The Pontiac Fiero? The Chrysler Airflow? That wasn't a serious question, because all of us know the answer already: the Chevrolet Corvair. Today's Junkyard Gem was built during the last gasps of Corvair production and now resides in a self-service car graveyard in Denver, Colorado.
Pick Your Part just shut down its funky, muddy old Denver operation on Federal Boulevard and moved it to a new location closer to the I-70/I-25 interchange. The cars sit on pavement instead of dirt, there's a nice view of downtown Denver, a taco truck sells lunches in the parking lot, and all the inventory was fresh for the April 1 grand opening.
I was one of the first customers to show up that morning, and so the Corvair still had all its badges when I found it.
More than 2 million Corvairs were built for the 1960 through 1969 model years, and plenty of them still sit in driveways, garages and yards awaiting repairs that never come. That means it's not too difficult to find examples of GM's radical rear-engined compact in junkyards to this day.
Since I started writing about discarded gems and treasures of automotive history in 2007, I've documented more than a dozen Corvairs in places like this, including a 1960 700 sedan, a 1962 700 wagon, another 1962 700 wagon, a 1962 Monza Club Coupe, a 1962 Rampside pickup, a 1963 Monza Club Coupe, another 1963 coupe, yet another 1963 coupe, still one more 1963 coupe, a 1964 convertible, a 1964 Monza sedan, a 1965 Monza coupe, a 1968 Monza coupe and a few dozen Corvairs sitting in a field near Pikes Peak.
The history of the Corvair is too complex for me to cover adequately here, so I suggest that you go read every word of automotive historian Aaron Severson's obsessively researched article on the subject before we go on.
The short version goes like this: Increasing numbers of American car shoppers were choosing small imported cars during the second half of the 1950s, with Volkswagen Beetles and Renault Dauphines moving out of showrooms in sufficient quantities to make Detroit at least slightly nervous. The American Motors Corporation cashed in on the trend by building compact Ramblers, which sold very well. Chrysler, Ford and GM each began developing compact cars that would debut as 1960 models.
Chrysler and Ford introduced some engineering and styling innovations with the Valiant and Falcon, but those cars were still reasonably traditional machines with water-cooled engines mounted up front and driving the rear wheels. General Motors, on the other hand, chose to go radical with its new Chevrolet compact.
To save weight and allow the use of a flat floor in the passenger compartment, the Corvair received an air-cooled boxer-six engine in the rear of the car. Combining the transmission and differential assemblies into a single transaxle unit and eliminating the liquid cooling system resulted in a nimble and efficient vehicle, with the first Corvairs scaling in at around 2,300 pounds.
