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| Chevrolet Corvair: not Ralph Nader's favourite automobile |
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But if the Audi 5000 did not have a fault, many others did. The Chevrolet Corvair, was a radical, beautiful roadster of the 1960s, with a revolutionary, rear-mounted engine. Unfortunately the combination of the engine being in the back and a rather primitive form of suspension led to peculiar handling characteristics in certain circumstances. So unusual, indeed, that it led safety campaigner Ralph Nader to write a book about it titled: 'Unsafe at any speed'. That book was its death warrant.
But the Corvair was not the only car with alternative handling. When the Skoda Estelle went on sale in the UK in 1977, consumer groups were so appalled by its manners they persuaded the Department of Transport to investigate what they saw as its wayward nature.
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| MK1: Mike Hawthorn's demise |
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Remember the Jaguar MK1 - the transport of choice for every 1950s bank-robber? It suffered from a rear track that was too narrow and it's been claimed this was a contributing factor in the accident that claimed the life of Mike Hawthorn, the then F1 world champion, though he was also going much too fast in atrocious conditions.
You risked your life in a 1973 Moskvich 412 in an entirely different way. The Consumer's Association branded this reasonably incompetent but otherwise apparently harmless Russian import 'dangerously unsafe' and, tautology aside, they had a point. So sharp were some of the interior fitments that you could survive an accident in one unharmed only to suffer the indignity of being stabbed by your own car whilst trying to get out.
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| Delorean: rust-proof but scratch-persistent |
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Other cars suffered from faults of construction rather than design. My mother had a Lancia Beta coupe in the early 1980s that you could almost hear fizzing it rusted so quickly. Alfa Romeo's Alfasud was built in an all-new factory by people who'd never built cars before using dirt-cheap Russian steel which also oxidized in next to no time at all.
John Z DeLorean's great idea was to construct his ill-fated gull-wing supercar from unpainted stainless steel, guaranteed never to rust. The problem was it scratched if you did much more than sneeze on it. Those doors also meant it was almost impossible to get out of if you turned one over or had a garage with a low ceiling.
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