Ypsilanti's stake in America's most controversial car — and how thin the line was between building it and killing it
What Came Off the Line
The Chevrolet Corvair was assembled at the Willow Run plant beginning in 1959, and for a few years the facility west of Ypsilanti was one of the primary production sites for a car that General Motors had staked genuine ambition on. The Corvair was unusual in every respect that mattered to a 1950s American engineer: rear-mounted air-cooled engine, unit body construction, independent suspension at all four corners. It was the kind of car that could have been made in Stuttgart. It was, briefly, made here.
Willow Run's relationship with automobile manufacturing was already layered by the time Corvair production began. The vast plant had been built by Ford in the early 1940s to produce B-24 Liberator bombers — a mile of assembly line under one roof, a technical achievement that drew national attention and wartime pride in equal measure. After the war, Kaiser-Frazer took over the space, making cars under the Kaiser and Frazer nameplates through the early 1950s before the company collapsed under pressure from the Big Three. General Motors arrived in the plant's next chapter, and the Corvair was among the vehicles it built there.
The car itself launched for the 1960 model year, positioned explicitly to compete with the Volkswagen Beetle and the wave of European compacts that had begun to eat into the American market. It was lighter than a conventional American car, nimble by domestic standards, and genuinely novel in its engineering. Sales were strong early on. The Corvair briefly outsold the Falcon, Ford's conventional, front-engined compact answer to the same market — though Ford quickly reversed that.
What Ralph Nader Did to It
The Corvair's handling characteristics in early production — specifically a tendency toward oversteer that engineers debated at the time and have debated since — became the central exhibit in Ralph Nader's Unsafe at Any Speed, published in 1965. The book's first chapter was devoted entirely to the Corvair, arguing that a design flaw in the rear suspension of the 1960–1963 models made the car prone to tuck under and rollover in certain conditions, and that General Motors had known this and proceeded anyway.
The political and cultural fallout was swift and lasting. Nader became a national figure. GM notoriously hired private investigators to dig up personal information on him, which backfired catastrophically when the effort became public, leading to a Senate hearing and a formal apology from GM's president. Congress passed the National Traffic and Motor Vehicle Safety Act in 1966. Nader's characterization of the Corvair as definitively dangerous has been contested: a study commissioned by the National Highway Traffic Safety Administration in the 1970s found the 1960–1963 Corvair's handling comparable to contemporary vehicles. The revised rear suspension introduced for the 1964 model year had already addressed the geometry Nader criticized. But by then the damage was reputational and irreversible.
General Motors discontinued the Corvair after the 1969 model year. It was not the only factor — the Camaro, introduced in 1967 to fight the Mustang, effectively replaced it in the lineup — but the car never recovered the public confidence it had lost.
What Ypsilanti Holds
The Ypsilanti Automotive Heritage Museum, housed in a former dealership on Rice Street, keeps the Corvair in its proper context: one chapter in a longer story of cars designed, assembled or conceived in this corner of southeast Michigan. The museum's focus on orphan marques and discontinued lines gives the Corvair a natural home, alongside Hudson, Kaiser-Frazer, Tucker and others that passed through or were made near here.
What the Corvair connection means for Ypsilanti is partly a matter of scale and partly a matter of timing. Willow Run at its postwar peak employed tens of thousands; by the Corvair years the numbers were smaller but the plant remained one of the largest manufacturing facilities in the region. Workers from Ypsilanti, Belleville, Ann Arbor and the townships between them came to that floor. The car they helped make became, against anyone's intention, a turning point in American consumer safety law.
The engineering arguments about the early Corvair have never entirely settled. Enthusiasts point to the 1965–1969 second-generation cars as among the most sophisticated American vehicles of their era — the turbocharged Spyder and the Corsa coupe in particular. Concours-quality examples appear at regional shows, and owners' clubs have maintained the cars with the intensity that attaches to things that were cancelled before their time.
What was actually made here, stated carefully: a rear-engined American compact, on a former bomber plant floor, west of Ypsilanti, during a decade when the city was still an industrial fact rather than an industrial memory. The car lasted ten model years, sold over a million and a half units across its life, supplied the founding argument of a landmark consumer-safety book, and helped produce legislation that governs vehicle safety to this day. That is a considerable return on a Midwest assembly line.
Keep reading