“It comes as something of a shock to all of us to discover that safe, sane, snow-proof Saab now has fetched up a model that’ll get second-gear rubber,” Patrick Bedard wrote in Car and Driver.
Nevertheless, the automotive press raved. “To make it work really well needed advanced engine management.” “The very first Saab turbos were not reliable cars,” said Jim Smart, owner of the Saab specialist Smart Motors in Santa Fe, N.M. In 1978, the Saab 99 had offered the first turbo on a production car since G.M.’s misfires. “We were the only company who had turbos in a standard production car, and the cars had such immense possibilities.” What I’m interested in selling is a high-performance Swedish four-passenger Porsche,’” he recalled telling the board, in a 2006 interview with Hemmings Sports and Exotics. “‘You guys appear set on building something akin to a stripped-down Scandinavian Volkswagen. Sinclair had a sales and marketing background that led him to challenge Saab’s business strategy. An affable but hard-charging executive whom Saab aficionados call “Uncle Bob,” Mr. That changed in 1979 when Robert Sinclair became president of Saab Cars USA. That agency later absolved the Corvair in a 140-page report, calling its handling “at least as good as the performance of some contemporary vehicles both foreign and domestic.”Īfter G.M.’s failures, turbos were seldom seen except on trucks, racecars and limited-production performance cars. His 1965 book, “Unsafe at Any Speed,” painted the Corvair as a deathtrap, ushered in an era of consumer activism and led to the founding of the National Highway Traffic Safety Administration.
The death of the Corvair was due not to the turbo but to Ralph Nader. Benzinger said, caused him to “shudder to this day.” A cast aluminum fan was substituted. Vaporized battery acid reacted with the Delrin to make formaldehyde gas, which flooded the cabin.
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In the Ohio cold, with the heater on full blast, so much current ran through the battery in the hot engine compartment that it essentially boiled. They drove the route radioing back and forth, “Smell anything yet?” Theories varied, postulating a problem with Toledo air or static electricity generated by the fan. Benzinger that as he accelerated from a tollbooth, “I started to choke, and my eyes started burning.”Ī frantic search for the cause was begun, leading to a convoy of four Corvairs retracing the route, each with one engineer from Chevrolet and one from DuPont.
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So Chevy worked with DuPont to make a lighter fan from a promising new plastic, Delrin, which caused an even worse problem.Īfter a trip from Detroit to Ohio, a test driver told Mr. The engine needed a belt-driven cooling fan, but belts failed at top revolutions per minute, owing to the weight of the fan. In tests, the turbo engine burned holes through the valves.
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