Date:         Wed, 24 Apr 96 17:50 CDT
Sender:       Vanagon Mailing List <vanagon@vanagon.com>
From:         khooper@wsp1.wspice.com (Ken Hooper)
Subject:      Re: bus with corvair engine


Austin Silvester told about how he'd installed a Corvair engine and
transaxle in a Bus, and it was great.

This next is completely anecdotal and thirdhand besides, so it should be
taken with the gravest skepticism. But, my Dad used to work for Johnson
Wax, which is a huge mega-national firm. Johnson Wax has run a huge fleet
of automobiles for the convenience of its salesmen since before automobiles
were invented. ;)

They used to like to be very chintzy about the fleet cars, figuring that if
it would roll at all it was good enough for the sales force, so they bought
them Pontiacs and low-end Fords. I think for a while they even made them
drive Nashes.

When the Corvair went on the market, Johnson Wax bought scads of them.
Ordered them by the thousands. What they really wanted were Beetles, for
cheapness and cheap maintenance, but the fleet buyers were forbidden by the
boardroom guys to buy foreign and the Corvair was supposed to be the
American answer to the Beetle.

They ended up dumping the Corvairs about as fast as they'd gotten into them
because--from the point of view of people who buy and maintain fleets--they
found them to be perfectly awful cars. Completely unreliable. Fifteen years
later the people who worked for that company were still laughing about what
POSs those Corvairs had been.

Now, they were Detroit iron and they were treated that way; points, plugs,
rotor and tires once a year and if it needed more attention than that it
must be garbage. If they were given the sort of coddling we do with our
baby-doll Buses, maybe they'd have been great. Silverster's balanced and
blueprinted work of art is a lot different from a salesman's jalopy.

But if you go putting Detroit iron in a Bus, it's probably because you want
to be able to set it and forget it, and I'm not convinced a Corvair is the
best option if you want to be able to dedicate yourself to neglect. (And
since the capacity to thrive on neglect is what quality *is* in Detroit
iron, I'm not convinced that the Corvair would have been able to convince
the American market that it was worthy even if Ralph Nader had never been
born).

--Ken
  68 Westy, 71 Bus