Wednesday, March 04, 2015

Automotif LXVIII...

1961 Chevy Greenbrier
Walking back to my car after lunch on Monday, I rounded a corner to see this peering at me over a snowbank.
1961 Chevrolet Corvan
It's a Chevrolet Greenbrier, aka "CorVan"; a van built on the floorpan and rear-engined powertrain of the Chevy Corvair.
61 corvair van
I wonder it it had the optional gasoline-fueled heater? Being air-cooled, they weren't very cozy without one.

Being an early '60s van, it's basically a big sheet metal box of air, weighing in at barely over 3,000 pounds with an empty tank. Car Life tested one with the base 145-c.i. flat-6 and recorded an extremely leisurely 0-60 time of 32.2 seconds, which isn't surprising given that the 2x1bbl motor was only pumping 80 horsepower (and those are the big imaginary gross horsepower, not the tiny realistic net ones we use now) through its two-speed Corvair Powerglide slushbox.