Junkyard Find: 1962 Chevrolet Corvair 700 Station Wagon
Other than the many Corvairs in the Brain Melting Colorado Junkyard, we haven’t seen any examples of GM’s rear-engined compact so far in this series. As recently as ten years ago, Corvairs were not uncommon sights in self-serve wrecking yards, and trashed ones are worth little more than scrap value today, but it took until a couple of weeks ago and a trip to California for me to find one.
This ’62 was parked in the import section of a huge Los Angeles yard, and my first glance at the engine-cooling vents gave me the impression that I was looking at a Volkswagen Type 3 Squareback. Nope!
This one has been picked over pretty well, so we can assume that some Corvairs that remain among the living have benefited from its organ donation.
It doesn’t have rust in the usual places that Maine or Michigan residents might expect— the rear quarters are solid, for example— but the floors have suffered from decades of leaky weatherstripping. You’ll get weeks of constant rain during Southern California winters, the carpets stay wet, and this happens.
Nice minimalist instrument cluster, which reminds me a lot of the ones in French cars of the same era.
This car still has a few bits to offer up, including the wagon-only glass. Let’s hope that stuff gets rescued before The Crusher goes squish.
Murilee Martin is the pen name of Phil Greden, a writer who has lived in Minnesota, California, Georgia and (now) Colorado. He has toiled at copywriting, technical writing, junkmail writing, fiction writing and now automotive writing. He has owned many terrible vehicles and some good ones. He spends a great deal of time in self-service junkyards. These days, he writes for publications including Autoweek, Hagerty and The Truth About Cars.
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IIRC , Ernie Kovacs was killed after he lost control of his '62 Corvair wagon while trying to light a cigar .
What kind of advanced alien technology was used to allow that hatch to stay up on its own...and without struts no less!! We don't have that ability even fifty years later.