QOTD: Which of These Automotive Pariahs Secretly Turns Your Crank?

This Question of the Day has its origin in a song, one which exists as something of a guilty pleasure. Actually, screw that, I’m a modern man (not postmodern, mind you) — I can admit it was Tiny Dancer by Elton John, which just happened to pop up on a Spotify playlist 15 minutes before I sat down to write this.

We often associate songs with a certain time and place in our lives, and that particular song — one of two by that artist I’ll admit to liking (the other being an apt description of a certain North Korean dictator) — immediately brought to mind a dark red, first-generation Chevrolet Corvair. A number of years back, nearing the end of a long road trip to Georgia and back, I found myself driving under leaden March skies in chilly Harrisburg, Pennsylvania, surely the sexiest city on the lower Susquehanna. Tiny Dancer came on the local station, and as I thought about life and mistakes, a burgundy-colored car came into view.

Resting just off a parking lot, it was, a “For Sale” sign stuck hopefully in its windshield. You never saw a more honest-looking 1964 Chevrolet Corvair Monza.

Corvair. The nameplate that brought us Ralph Nader’s Unsafe At Any Speed and the subsequent revolution in consumer advocacy and vehicle safety.

The pristine Monza example for sale in Harrisburg might not be as fearful a vehicle as you’d expect. In 1964, General Motors added transverse leaf springs and softer coil springs to the infamous swing arm rear suspension, plus a front anti-roll bar, in the hopes of taming the model’s alarming rollover tendencies. For the model’s 1965 redesign, GM replaced the swing axle setup with a conventional independent rear suspension. No inside wheel tuck-under, no rollovers, no body count. Just a safe, if unconventional, air-cooled and rear-engined model with a horrible reputation.

From 1965 onwards, sales shrunk exponentially until the model’s demise in 1969. Still, the Corvair had its fans, and as a relic of an experimental era in the automotive industry it remains a quirky collector item.

This got me thinking about other automotive pariahs. The Chevrolet Vega, with its attractive design, appealing Cosworth variant, and well publicized teething troubles, looms large. Imagine finding one without the horrific early corrosion problems and sleeveless, aluminum-silicon time bomb of an engine. A nice, later example that wouldn’t overheat if you lit a match nearby.

The same goes for the Ford Pinto, what with its unfortunate gas tank placement. Actually, maybe the Pinto better fulfills the description of a time bomb.

Gas tank ruptures aside, the compact Pinto came in a cute two-door wagon variant (which didn’t suffer the fuel tank maladies of its hatchback sibling), and even offered a German-built V6 engine for those sick of winding up the company’s tepid four-cylinders. And the far-out Cruising Wagon? A National Highway Traffic Safety Administration-mandated recall eventually led to the reinforcing of the Pinto’s fuel tank, meaning increased crash performance and added peace of mind.

There’s no shortage of vehicles with bad reputations for unreliability or remarkable ugliness, but these three models, spanning models years 1960 to 1980, represent the pinnacle of automotive notoriety. Still, that doesn’t mean there aren’t genuine reasons for wanting one. For today’s question, we’re asking which of these three vehicles — any year, any variant — you’d like to have in your garage.

Try to refrain from straying outside the terrible trio listed here. What’s it going to be? Corvair, Vega, or Pinto?

[Image: Wikimedia Commons ( CC BY-SA 2.0)]