CHEVROLET CORVAIR 700
With few opportunities to use the Corvair, I thought the best thing to do was get it registered and legal on the road. The only significant physical improvement I have made has been fitting a new set of cheap and cheerful tyres – of the correct size – all round.
Getting the V5 was easier said than done. My initial approaches to the DVLA were put on hold by COVID-19 and then, in the summer, a letter appeared stating that it wanted to send somebody out to inspect the car. When the man from the ministry appeared, all he really wanted to see was a chassis number. I showed him the plate in the engine compartment, which I’d assumed was a chassis number but was actually a plate stating the paint code, or appeared to be.
Anyway, a week or two later I got another letter from the DVLA saying that because he couldn’t find a chassis number, it could not be certain of the car’s year of manufacture and that the only thing it could offer was a ‘Q’ plate and non-historic tax status. It quoted an all-purpose, Dvlagenerated chassis number that I had to get stamped on to the chassis.
None of this appealed so I made further enquiries into the way these cars were built and sold on the South African market. Dave Newell of the Corvair Society of America, or CORSA, is a leading world authority on Corvair history and the SA Corvairs are one of his pet subjects. It seems there were never very many of them, and they came in different colour schemes and with features not found on the North American cars to get the local-content percentage up. It turns out that Corvairs were sent out as CKD kits a dozen at a time from General Motors in the US to its plant in South Africa. GM cars for SA had a screwed-on ID tag on the left-hand side of the engine compartment, as on my car: there was no other VIN plate or serial number, unlike on the Americanmarket cars. My car is SAR87735P: the ‘SA’ stands for South Africa and 87735 is the total of GM cars (all models, not just Corvairs) assembled locally up to that point. The ‘P’ is for Powerglide.
The bottom line is that it’s a 1960 model, sold new in 1962.
As Newell explained, Corvairs sold slowly in South Africa because they were left-hookers, so no other kits were ordered from GM by GMSA after 1960, although they were still being sold as new cars until 1962. I found further evidence to back up my case in the Owner Protection Policy book that I should have sent with my original documents but had forgotten about. It states that serial number 87735 was sold new in March 1962.
Fingers crossed that all of this satisfies the DVLA as to the car’s origins and validates the chassis number situation.
Hopefully by the time you read this I will not only have documents on the Corvair but also be using it, once Mike Connor of Purley Road Garage has gone through the brakes, cured the valve-cover oil leaks and adjusted some of the play out of the steering.