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The Corvair remains the only mass-produced, rear-engine, air-cooled car ever built by an American manufacturer, and for most of the 1960s it genuinely competed with the VW Beetle — even spawning a turbocharged Monza Spyder and a 180-horsepower turbo Corsa. Then a single book changed everything, and sales collapsed from more than 300,000 units a year to just 6,000. Read on for the full story of the Corvair’s rise and its rapid fall.
This 1971 Chevrolet Nova arrived at Vanguard Motor Sales with barely a paragraph of description, but the comments filled in the blanks fast — viewers pegged it as a serious resto-mod running what one commenter called ‘7.4 liters of fun,’ shorthand for a 454 cubic-inch big block Chevrolet never offered in this body style. The amber lighting and paint drew their own praise, with one viewer calling it a flat-out show stopper. Watch to see a compact built as a blank canvas rather than a numbers-matching original.