It was the late 1950’s, and the US automotive industry was being besieged by efficient, well-built cars from across the ocean, in the first of many waves that continue to this day. Of course, in those days, the ocean was the Atlantic, and the car that was giving them fits was Volkswagen’s Beetle, and to a lesser extent Fiats and Renaults. Small cars (by US standards) were seemingly on everyone’s drawing boards. Independents Studebaker (Lark) and American Motors (American) had established their beachheads first, and to good effect: each of those cars sold well, and were the basis for later sporty variants that would be the potential saviors of each of those brands. Cross-town rivals Ford and Chrysler were hard at work on their Falcon/Comet and Valiant/Dart models. 

GM’s answer to the challenge posed by the Beetle was at once predictable and unprecedented. As has been the case many times over, General Motors engineered a car that was seemingly a re-work of the VW’s basic design. Air-cooled rear-mounted engine? Check! Swing axle rear suspension? Driver-forward van and truck variants? Check and Check! Light, rigid body mounted on a stiff flat platform?  Uh, no.  

Chevrolet chief engineer Ed Cole had developed an appreciation for aircraft construction, and felt unit-body construction was the best way to build a light-but-sturdy design. Except for the swing-axles – which had proven problematic in proving-grounds tests as one prototype after another flipped over do to ‘jacking’ (the outside wheel tucking under the car, triggering a roll-over) – the design was a success. It was small, roomy, and stiff (for its day) and was an aesthetic success, as well. Rather than the VW’s anemic four-cylinder unit, the Corvair had a horizontally-opposed flat six. The look was long, low and clean with its airy greenhouse, and it inspired a handful of production car designs in Europe.  

When the car was introduced for the 1960 model year, it won Motor Trend’s coveted ‘car of the year’ award. Chevrolet got to work on higher-horsepower versions featuring a turbocharged flat-six. Design houses in Europe began penning ‘carrosserie’ Corvairs. That first year, over 250,000 Chevy Corvairs were built in the US and Canada . By the end of 1963, over 1,000,000 had been pushed out the door.  

In an attempt to spread the cost of the unit-body Corvair (the first such design produced by Fisher Body), GM engineering proposed a family of Corvair clones for other GM divisions. One, the Pontiac Polaris, was fairly well along before John DeLorean, mindful of the flipping accidents at the proving grounds, put a stop to it.The scuttled Polaris had unique sheet metal forward of the cowl that mimicked the look of the 1959 full-size Pontiacs . Ironically, the Pontiac Tempest, introduced in 1961, kept the problematic swing-axles, along with the rear-mounted transaxle, coupled via a flexible driveshaft (think very thick speedometer cable) to a large, rackety slant-four that was no more than a lopped-in-half V8. This car, too, won Motor Trend’s car-of-the-year award, in 1961.