Welcome to Found Around The District, where we highlight fascinating cars we find around a city where people are too busy fighting through traffic and hunting for parking to drive anything interesting: Washington, D.C.
I'm kind of jealous of my fiancee when it comes to these "Found Around" stories. Why? Because she always finds cooler cars than I do. That Studebaker Commander from Austin last year? All her. She pointed out that great 912 in D.C. more recently, too. And this weekend, she found a Chevrolet Corvair for our enjoyment.
You know what I had for you until she found this? An old Honda Prelude. Yeah, this is much cooler.
It's timely, too, since we were just talking about the Corvair yesterday. I won't repeat what you saw there, and you probably know the gist of the car anyway: it was built as an air-cooled, rear-engine American competitor to cars like the Volkswagen Beetle.
Built in a variety of styles, inlcuding sedans, wagons, coupes, convertibles and even trucks, the Corvair wasn't so much a single car as an entire range of vehicles. That range died off within a few years of Nader's controversial indictment of its handling.
My fiancee was the one who snapped the photos of this blue-on-white convertible Corvair. I was not able to track it down myself to see it person, but she assures me it looked to be in excellent shape. It certainly looks that way from her pictures. It's pretty clearly from the first generation, the one built between 1960 and 1964, although I'm not certain of the exact year. One of you probably knows the answer.
I'm a big fan of these cars and their unique history. Does anyone have any great Corvair stories they could share with the class?