You may be thinking to yourself, “Hey, it looks like that Corvair is driving in a river!” You’d be right and the friendly but authoritative voice narrating the film makes things even better when he tells us spellbound watchers that the Corvair drove in said river for “20-miles”! Why did they drive the Corvair in the river for 20 miles? We can only imagine but it does look cool and they probably did it for the same reason you’ll see one spinning out in the dirt, driving figure eights in the dirt, lapping Lime Rock, trying to stop on airport runway fire retardant foam, driving through mud holes, slogging up and down steep dirt hills, driving through tall weeds, and crashing into the back of a 1960 Chevy. We love the fact that they use the term, “deliver the goods” more than once in the six minutes of 1960 perfection that is this video.

Of course the Corvair was embroiled into one of the great product safety cases of all time and while Ralph Nader did a great job of creating a public smear campaign against the car and its supposed tendencies to drive erratically due to the swing axle rear suspension, the cars were sold from 1960-1969 and they were sold in high volume. In 1965 more than 200,000 of them were on the roads. Validation for the Corvair came in the early 1970s when studies performed by Texas A&M as well as the National Highway Traffic Safety Administration proved the cars to be no more dangerous or ill handling than cars being made at that time period, proving Ralph Nader’s “case” was more based on people not taking care of their cars (poor tire inflation, etc) than an engineering flaw with the machine itself. 20 miles in a river? The Covair was strong like bull!

PRESS PLAY BELOW TO SEE THE 1960 CORVAIR DO ALL KINDS OF FUN STUFF ON TERRAIN VARYING FROM THE AQUATIC TO THAT OF A MOUNTAIN GOAT!