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Interesting design criteria - how the car is going to be shipped from the factory. The Chevy Vega and the Pontiac version were designed to be shipped on their noses in specially designed rail cars called Vert-A-Pacs allowing for thirty cars to be shipped at a time rather than the usual eighteen. They probably should have spent a little more time on the engine design and the rustproofing. I was working at a weld shop when these pieces of junk were in production. The boss sent me over to the local Chevy dealer to measure up for a guard on an air compressor and there was a big stack of fenders in the room that had been warrantied due to rust damage. They only had a three year warranty, by the way. GM was constantly upgrading the cars and by the end of the production run they were almost mediocre. Sort of like the history of the Corvair. Apparently that lesson hadn't sunk home too well. As most of the Vegas rusted away early on, if you were born after 1980 it's quite conceivable that you never have, nor ever will see a Vega. When I was on my bicycle trip out West a few years back, I saw one actually being driven on the street. My buddy and I both looked at each other in disbelief and then swapped a few Vega horror stories. And then came the Chevette.
The Missus and I are in the market for a new car. Since the last decent Chevy I owned was a '67 Impala, we'll probably bypass the Chevy dealers. There are no more Oldsmobiles or Pontiacs to be had, so not much left in the GM line to interest me. We're both driving Dodges now but, and I hate to say it, I might end up with a Japanese brand. Of course, the Subaru is made less than an hour away from me and I have a couple of my former students employed there, so it's Japanese but made in America.
The story of the Detroit automakers going into the toilet has been well documented over the years so I don't really have to go into it, but they never really seemed to learn much or at least fast enough to recover their market share. If they built a decent small car the Koreans wouldn't have been able to set up shop here in the last few years and cut their sliver of the pie even smaller. Cash for Clunkers. Too Big to Fail. Maybe just so poorly managed that they can't make a decent small car at a profit. When I read the book about Detroit recently (Sept. 14 post), the author mentioned the auto execs going to Washington to look for a handout. The Chrysler guys had a chase car with tools and engineers following them because they weren't sure the hybrid would make it all the way. And then the big shots flew back home.
4 comments:
I have very mixed feelings about the Vega. I was the "custodian" of two: My Mother's '73 station wagon, and my first car, a '71 hatchback. This was back when they were each about 4 years old. My God these vehicles could rust before your eyes. Especially with the Northern Ohio winters that these two cars were exposed to.
My Mother’s car was my first experience with Bondo. By the time I was done, there were few locations where you could stick a magnet. It became the winter-beater family car. One cold, single-digit temperature winter night the family loaded up to go out to eat. Leaving the parking lot after the meal, the engine belched once, and locked up. Towed it to my buddy’s garage. He brought the top of the piston to study hall with him the next day. Never saw anything like it. This was an engine with better than regular oil/filter changes. Piston broke in two at the wrist pin.
When I purchased my ’71 hatchback from a school teacher, it was a few years old, and already it was working on consuming it’s second pair of front fenders. The car was a deep metallic green, but the fenders were canary yellow (factory color). The front valence was silver. The rear quarter panels flapped in the wind. But hey, it had factory a/c, which also served as an auxiliary braking system. I once slid into a mailbox on the way to school one cold snowy morning, and left ten pounds of rust in the homeowner’s driveway. Before long I could see the right rear tire through the inside plastic fender panel. I maintained the lil aluminum 4 cyl engine as best as one could hope for, but it began using oil. Then at random intervals it would let out a huge belch of oil smoke, which I fondly referred to as my chemical tailgating countermeasures.
After a couple years, the timing belt broke (actually broke through the plastic timing belt cover and dented the hood like a ballpark frank). I fixed it, but by then the little car was rusting to the point where the suspension was becoming unstable. I traded it in for $250 credit toward a model that honda had introduced only a year before: They called it the Accord.
But to be fair, let me say that the Accord hatchback had serious rust issues also (it was a ’77 model). The front struts popped through the fenders after a few years, and I traded it to an ’81 Olds Cutlass. The diesel. Yeah, I know.
But I loved the lines of the Vega. It was in many ways a ‘Mini Camaro’, inside and out. A V8 stuffed into a little Vega at the dragstrip always turned heads, at least until the V8 Monzas showed up. Alas, like you say, not many survived. And perhaps in the end, that’s a good thing.
But I still have fond memories mixed in with the hair-pulling ones.
For a good read about the auto industry, and the foreign invasion of the late seventies and early eighties, read David Halberstam’s “The Reckoning” (1986).
Continuing to enjoy your posts, as always… Rich
Hey, I see what looks to be a canary yellow station wagon in that picture.
And by 'mini-camaro', I mean interior and exterior styling only, of course. :-)
Sounds like yours was a pretty typical experience with the car. They were fun to drive until the pieces started falling off and the engines quit. The '50's and '60's Chevy's were really decent cars which made the small cars all the more pathetic. If they would have just lopped a couple of cylinders off the Blue Flame six, they would have had a decent engine. There's no excuse for the body's rusting away like they did. The '71 pickup was the same way. I had one of those in the GMC model. Ran good with the small block and the suspension was strong like an ox, but the body? Like the Vega - everything from stem to stern rusted.
The Japanese had similar rust issues as you noted but were smart enough to realize they weren't going to corner a piece of the market unless things got better. And boy did they.
I'm still amazed that GM could build such great automobiles for years - my '71 Cutlass was a great car, kept it for 25 years - and then they turned out some of the turds they did in the 70's & 80's.
Thanks for checking in.
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