I think it also has a split journal crankshaft to turn the 90 degree V8 block into a 60 degree V6.

The Lotus Twin Cam was basically an OHV Ford Kent block with a DOHC head designed by Harry Mundy with some work by Duckworth and Costin of later Cosworth fame. The original cam in the block was retained as a jackshaft to run the oil pump and I think the distribolator drive.

wmba,

I wasn’t trying to be disingenuous, just pointing out that the 1st gen Corvair wasn’t the only car with swing axles. Different manufacturers tried different workarounds, like the ones you mentioned, to avoid swing axles inherent problems. GM went with oddball tire pressures. It’d be interesting to hear what kind of back and forth went on between the Corvair engineers and the bean counters.

I suppose that the “rope drive” Tempest and the V8-6-4 are examples of a good idea that needed better development or more advanced technology than was available at the time. After all, there are plenty of cars with rear transaxles & torque tubes, and cylinder deactivation today.

BTW, you might enjoy looking at Jay Eitel’s “Jaguair” V12 Corvair. He’s using the Tempest torque tube and [modified] transaxle, so my guess is that as weird as the “rope drive” is, it can handle some power and torque.

As for pushrods, I still own a (disassembled) Lotus w/ a Twin Cam so in general I favor high rpm high output engines. That being said, the LS9 is a pushrod engine and seems to get along pretty well without overhead cams. If I’m not mistaken, wasn’t the Ilmor/Mercedes indy engine a pushrod design?

As you alluded to, a lot has to do with development. Much as I like DOHC engines, IRS and 4 wheel disks, if well implemented, pushrods, live axles, and even drum brakes can perform well.

Regarding I mean, who reads the owner’s manual?

I guess, being a RTFM kind of guy, I have little sympathy for folks who won’t, or even bother to look at the sticker on the door jamb (though I can’t recall if those stickers were there back in the 60s, I didn’t get my driver’s license till 1971). I don’t have scorn for “uneducated” autoworkers who make $60K, but I don’t much respect folks who can’t set the clock on their car radio.

As for the Datsun 510, a fine car, no doubt, though most of the early Japanese cars were not exactly, as you point out with the 240Z, rust free. I remember my brother trying to shore up the front end of his disintegrating 77 or 78 Accord with some angle iron and welding and there just wasn’t enough left that wasn’t iron oxide alloy to weld to.

IRS, OHC, disc brakes. We tried all that and it doesn’t work. Time to get back to making road-hugging overweight dinosaurs like the 1971 Chevrolet.

I think we agree that GM became conservative and risk adverse following the Corvair and other experiments in the early 60s. Drop me an email please.
rokem@netzero.net

LOL

No, I’m sure if I could find that old car, in whatever moldering rust-flaked-shape it might be in, if I took it to a Nissan dealership today, Carlos Ghosn would be there to give me a neck massage and soothe my worries by rebuilding the car and making it perfect once again. For free, even though it’s 28 years out of warranty, because that’s the way service works when you buy from a Japanese automaker.

You forgot a few:
- That the Executives of Nissan need to be subject to Mengle-like experiments
- That Nissan employees need to slowly starve in poverty

All this to please justice minded TTAC readers.

Based on the logic offered up here, I’m sure all Nissans built today suffer from all the same problems. I’ll never own one! I hope everyone can learn from Dad’s experience…ALL NISSAN’S EVER BUILT ARE TERRIBLE AND ALWAYS WILL BE!!

Me too! Except my parents was a 78. Pity we didn’t know each other, we could have had the world’s slowest, but only Froot Loops powered, heads-up race ever.

The 1961 Tempest with the rope drive to a rear swing axle was another joke. How long did that last?

Funny, a co-worker and his dad restored one of these for the sake of nostalgia. That rope drive was one of the whackiest things I’d ever seen. Coupled with the ‘hay-bailer’ 4, it was something to behold.

I distinctly recall replacing the rear main seal that blew out on my brother’s ‘78 Monte Carlo ~46K miles with beforementioned Buick 231 V6. Car ran like crap from day one. The engine was popular and problems were definitely not restricted to this one particular ‘78 Monte Carlo.

To be fair – the engine was re-engineered from its early sliced off V8 hacko origins (including the unbalanced firing sequence and timing) before emerging as the Buick 3800. I wonder if GM renamed it from the “231″ to the 3800 to bury the bodies. The 3800, I believe, enjoyed a better reputation.

1998 Chevy 1500 Silverado, I was moving cross country, 1st new truck I ever owned. It died 200 miles from my destination, transmission blew! This is the truth it blew at 35,900 (ish) miles and at midnight my three year warranty would have been up! The fun times of getting stuck in a po-dunk town in the middle of Oregon waiting for over a week b/c they cannot find a transmission for one of the “best” selling trucks! I guess everyone else needed them too!

THANK YOU! I thought I was the only one!

I purchased a brand new 1997 Silverado in December of ‘96. Everything that could break on it did.

I made the mistake of picking it up from the dealer at night. The next morning, in the light, I noticed that one of the small body panels (behind the front bumper) wasn’t even painted – it was still dull gray. Things went swiftly downhill from there.

First it was “simple things” like the alternator, wipers (they stopping working while I was on a busy freeway in a very heavy downpour – I thought I was a goner), the fuel gauge sender (requires – by design – replacement of the whole fuel tank to fix), fuel injectors, and, well, the list keeps going… Every few months it was something.

Meanwhile – my wife’s Honda at 118K just kept going without complaint.

Then, at about 72K the engine coordinated an impressive head gasket and rear main seal blowout combo. This is on a truck that had an easy suburbia life. The hardest thing it had to do was haul a few sheets of plywood from Home Depot.

I can’t imagine what things would have been like if it had to actually tow something or be on a farm.

I fell in love with GM products during the muscle car days in high school – now after a lifetime of GM products, this truck finally convinced me I was done with them.

-C

Saturn is an embarrassment, though, because it showed that GM build and run a decent business model but actively chose to euthanize it in favour of “business as usual”. The sheer potential of Saturn, since pissed away, is amazing.

People (justifiably) rip Roger Smith for a lot of things, but Saturn showed that he at least had a clue about what was wrong at GM though he hadn’t the leadership ability (and perhaps too much ego) to fix it. He was effectively forced to create a proof-of-concept because de-barnacling existing divisions wasn’t possible. And you know, he was right: Saturn brought new, extremely loyal customers and showed GM could build competitive, low-margin product. If Smith and his successors could have infected more of GM with Saturn, rather than the opposite, who knows where it would be today?

GM has been doing IRS, disc brakes on four corners and fuel injection for a very long time on the Corvette. Full body on frame was reserved for trucks even by the 70’s, and front discs were on option on most GM cars (if not all) by the 70’s as well. GM always did full/mid size RWD cars right, with a few missteps here and there.

I am not going to make any excuses for the OHV V8, it can defend itself. Same with the Chevy straight six, which Pontiac took and stuck the cam in the head in the 60’s by the way. The V8’s and i6’s that GM was fond of at the time didn’t lend themselves well to being OHC (too big and/or too expensive) and 4 cylinder engines were either too small for the cars Americans were buying or too big to run smoothly. Until the 70’s OHV 4 Cylinders were also very common outside of premium European cars, it was optional on the Datsuns. There was no such thing as a “Premium” small American car at the time so high content 4 bangers just didn’t exist.

All small cars (even the godlike Civic) were unsafe rust buckets filled with electrical gremlins during the 70’s. People bought them because they had to, not because they wanted to.

The one thing Japan got right from the start was that their engines did not die.. ever. The rest of the car might fall apart, but right up until that car gets crushed the engine will continue to function correctly. If the Vega was kept the same but GM threw every last dollar and cent they had into making a reliable motor for it people might have remembered it differently.

That damn Toyota 2T-C would keep going in defiance of all the other important crap breaking on the car.

“While the shortcomings of swing axles are now well known, I’m not sure that you can call a component that was used by a number of other contemporary manufacturers a design flaw. The best solution? No, but you you can say the same about drum brakes, which were standard equipment on most cars for a decade or more after disk brakes were introduced. While drum brakes won’t cause your car to spin out or roll like swing axles, they do fade and don’t stop as well as disks.

Swing axles were a standard engineering solution in the late 50s and early 60s. They were used on VWs, Triumphs (including the early Spitfires), Porsches and Mercedeses. Like I said, GM went to a true IRS years before VW.”

This seems a bit disingenuous as an explanation if you lived through that era as a car enthusiast like I did. The Corvair was weird from the start, what with recommended 15/26 psi F/R tire pressures. It was well known that the average joe would put in 26 all round, at which point the car was actively dangerous. I mean, who reads the owner’s manual? There were handling articles in the magazines trying out different tire pressures. Car Life had a good one. The whole topic of the swing axle Corvair was extensively debated well before Nader came along in ‘65 as a Johnny-come-lately on the scene. Hell, the ‘64 had a compensator bar on the swing axle to stop full swing axle droop, just like the aftermarket ones already available for several years, and what GM already had put on the Corvair Monza for a couple of years. Cynical marketing or what?

The Mercedes had a compensator linkage from the start, the Spitfire was a handful but had about 10 degrees of preloaded negative camber to compensate, so those boys knew it was a nasty cheap design, but both were front-engined, and not weird like the Corvair. Driven all three of those cars, and the Corvair stands out as wacked. The VWs and Porsches did not have a great big flat six hung out back (with a claimed 80 hp, ha, ha. With a Powerglide 2 speed tranny, the Corvair was barely quicker than the Beetle, and in a wind, you’d want to stop the car and wait for the bad weather to be over. Any way you look at it, the car was an absolute dog. Let’s not get revisionist here. It was worse than anything else out there for the first four model years. When Nader blew the whistle, none of us were surprised, other than at his balls for making things SO public.

Detroit held back disc brakes for years (after the rest of the world adopted them) even on otherwise good designs (’66 Toronado). We used to say that it was because they didn’t think of them first — it was those damn Brits at Girling. Volvos had disc brakes on the 122S from the early 60s.

Later on, Detroit held on to pushrods, just ‘coz everyone else was changing to OHC, and you didn’t need ‘em anyway. They knew. Pontiac DID bring out the OHC 6 for the ‘66 Tempest, which distinguished itself by overheating if you flogged it as Car and Driver related. That was the end of OHCs at GM for decades! Well, the rustbucket Chevette had one. Again as C/D put it, the Chevette was the only third world car made in the USA (Georgia, I believe). It was an utter turd, but tough, if locomotion even after the A pillars had rusted through on the INSIDE of the car is a virtue.

The 1961 Tempest with the rope drive to a rear swing axle was another joke. How long did that last? 2 model years at best. The Olds F85 with the world-beating 2 speed (!) Jetaway tranny and the aluminum V8 was another wonder of the age. Especially with the turbo and water injection. Reliabilty measured in days. Sure GM innovated, but underdeveloped, got burned, and returned to making the usual dross except for the Toronado.

The Buick 231 V6 was a hack job on their small iron-block V8 for the intermediate Special, so had a weird firing sequence. 90 degrees between some power strokes, 150 between others. It loped at idle like an out of breath distance runner, until the two plane crank was developed, at which point it became a tough old bird. Even so, much better than the disastrous aluminum V8 it replaced which GM managed to flog to Rover for further decades of unfaithful service.

Enough of slagging GM. My vote for most cynical piece of crap car foisted on the car-buying public has to be the 1969 Ford Maverick. Delivered with factory-fresh rust to a Ford dealer near you, it was a cheap version of the 1960 Falcon, only 10 years after. The ultimate piece-of-shit Maverick came with a rust through lifetime measured in months, as in 8, two winters worth. The Pinto wasn’t much better rust wise at about 3 winters before the doors rusted through, but at least that was as long as the Vega took if its engine lasted that long.

Yup, looking back on it, I’d have to say GM cars were crap. They were, however, less crappy than most of the others. And then in the early 70s, Toyota and Datsun hit hard. The 240 Z was a rusty sweetie, the 510 a great little car in ‘69 what with OHC and full IRS and disc brakes.

The beginning of the end for the General. yeah look at that baby shit-brown 510 over there, their people would say. IRS, OHC, disc brakes. We tried all that and it doesn’t work. Time to get back to making road-hugging overweight dinosaurs like the 1971 Chevrolet. Yup right to this day, the only car the General makes properly is the separate frame, front engine, rear drive vehicle honed after decades of effort into a not bad conveyance. 2009 Silverado, anyone?

Don’t forget that tens of thousands of people were willing to travel to Spring Hill for a “Homecoming” in the mid-90’s. Understanding exactly how GM squandered that enormous reservoir of goodwill would probably go a long way toward explaining their current predicament.

1. 1980 Chevy Impala, I remember fondly pushing the dead 3 ton behemoth at the young age of 6 with my mom through a busy intersection. It liked to just die at random times, but it’s favorite was when she was trying to make a left hand turn.

2. The 1985 Cadillac Cimmaron that as a kid I remember the radio disintegrating in my hand and I lived in fear that I destroyed my father’s first Cadillac! Little did i know it was Chevy engineering.

3. My grandfather’s Mint Green Caprice Classic, I don’t have many memories of it b/c well it really never ran. I do remember the upholstery was crunchy to the touch.

4. My first car a 1983 Cadillac Eldorado! I loved that car, it was a pile of junk, but I loved that car. My complaint, the backseat was way too small!!

5. 1998 Chevy 1500 Silverado, I was moving cross country, 1st new truck I ever owned. It died 200 miles from my destination, transmission blew! This is the truth it blew at 35,900 (ish) miles and at midnight my three year warranty would have been up! The fun times of getting stuck in a po-dunk town in the middle of Oregon waiting for over a week b/c they cannot find a transmission for one of the “best” selling trucks! I guess everyone else needed them too!

6. The 2005 Monte Carlo I rented for a week while in California. The sun visor fell off resulting in me driving west into the setting sun for 3 hours.

**I will make one note every single one of the GM cars I’ve owned that had something power, at one time or the other it died. Power window’s died during a monsoon/dust storm. Power seats dies after I let my 6′ 5″ friend drive, I’m 5′ 10″. Power stearing, in the Cimmaron, dies during a trip to Cali almost resulting in us dying in the freeway!

Ahh, the memories. After my Silverado transmission blew up, I vowed never would I buy a GM built vehicle again. Although, I do swear by this, there is nothing like driving cross-country in either a Cadillac or a fully decked out Suburban w/King of The Road blaring on the radio. So when I see those ad’s for a fully decked out Suburban, I get an urge…but I squash it like a bug! The Outback and Civic will not share space with such breads as a GM!

5.

Absolutely wrong re failure to update. The ‘94 and ‘95 (years 4 and 5) sold extremely well. The problem was that the updating turned a cool-looking car into a dud that you couldn’t tell from a Hyundai, a Tercel, or an Oldsmobile,a nd turned a sporty car into something that drove like donkey dung.

@jackc10: would you get it touch with me at motorlegends@aol.com? I’d love to hear more about the way GM treated Saturn.

We also know GM spends billions and billions on research and development. And has a mammoth facility for testing–”proving”–their creations.

So WHY have such fiascoes happened so many times? Incompetent engineers? Incompetent managers who set goals for low cost or production date that can only be met by half-assed ideas? Apathy throughout the design and production cycle (”who cares?”)? Inability to learn from past mistakes?

I’ve said before it’s easier to learn what goes on inside the CIA than the D3’s decision-making processes. But engineering disasters don’t just happen; they were caused. Anyone know why it’s been so common at giant GM? Michael Karesh, did you hear about these blunders when you were studying the company?

…especially if you had the misfortune under the hood of the above mentioned Buick V6.

I’m pretty sure you’re thinking of the Chevrolet 229 V6. Honestly it could be both, but that Buick V6 was a great engine.

Despite all the odds against it – the Chevette was a pretty reliable car. It was just very, well, plain.

The Saturns were also remarkably reliable. My brother had one that went well over 200K before he sold it (and it still ran). I knew of others that had similar experiences.

Otherwise – excellent list and right on. Especially the diesel 5.7 – those never went beyond 50K miles without self destructing and the X-cars which had no redeeming characteristics whatsoever.

I’d like to add a few to the list:

The Buick 231 V6. This was a V8 with two cylinders cut off. Unbalanced by design. If you looked at the distributor you could even see the gaps where the two missing spark plug wires would have been.

The ‘78 – ‘79 Monte Carlo. Overstyled and unreliable. The fake chrome bumper trim falls off on the way home from the dealer. It was a miracle if you could get more than 60K miles from one of these – especially if you had the misfortune under the hood of the above mentioned Buick V6.

Any light blue or silver GM car of the 70s and early 80s. The hood and trunk won’t be blue/silver for very long.

-C

Aaaaaaaaaaack, someone had to bring up (a pun!)the Chevy Beretta/Corsica. I used to work in pharmaceutical sales, and one of my rivals worked at a company that sold dermatological products. They didn’t have to carry big sample packs, so the company downsized the sales reps cars…to the Beretta/Corsica. The pharma company threatened to never lease GMs again unless they took them all back. The sales people were spending too much time f**king around getting their cars repaired.

Then Saturn had to jack up the costs to what the rest of GM wanted to charge.

It is also an interesting story about the Saturn body panels that were virtually indestructable and how GM severely limited Saturn’s ability to advertise such because “heavy metal GM” could see no advantage to fenders that could bounce back from a boot kick with no damage.