The New Generation

(See Cover) Not since Henry Ford put the nation on wheels with his model T has such a great and sweeping change hit the auto industry. Out from Detroit and into 7,200 Chevrolet showrooms this week rolled the radically designed Corvair, first of the Big Three's new generation of compact cars. Smaller and simpler than Detroit's chromespun standards, the Corvair is like no other model ever mass-produced in the U.S.; its engine is made of aluminum and cooled by air, and it is mounted in the rear. To Chevrolet's folksy, brilliant General Manager Edward N. Cole, 50, who is as square and compact (195 Ibs., 5 ft. 9 in.) as a Corvair, the new car marks the fulfillment of a 15-year dream; for that long, off and on, he has been trying to produce a rear-engine car. Says Ed Cole jubilantly: "If I felt any better about our Chevy Corvair, I think I'd blow up."

Many of the nation's drivers are just as excited. No sooner had Chevrolet announced the Corvair than it began to write orders. Hertz Rent-A-Car signed up for 3,000. Chicago Dealer Zollie Frank wanted 10,000, but Chevy turned him down to spread the supply. St. Louis Dealer Gene Jantzen has a unique ringside seat in the small-car derby; his showroom is right across from a Chevy assembly plant. Says he: "People toured that plant and peeked through the knotholes at the Corvair. Some even climbed atop their cars outside the plant to get a look. Then they came over to our place and ordered a Corvair." So far, Chevy has totted up 33,000 Corvair orders.

"The Most Interesting Year." The other Detroit compact cars are also firing up great expectations in the marketplace. Next week Ford, rushing up its introduction by two months to catch Corvair, brings out its front-engine Falcon. Late this month Chrysler, advancing its debut from February 1960, bows with its front-engine Valiant.

This is just a prelude. Next spring Ford will roll out a compact Edsel called Comet. In a year Buick, Oldsmobile and Pontiac will come in both compact and regular sizes. All told, Detroit is betting $700 million on these cars--about $150 million on the Corvair, $100 million each for Falcon and Valiant, $350 million for the "bigger" compacts. How well this huge gamble pays off will affect not only Detroit, but automakers and buyers round the world. Says West Germany's Heinz Nordhoff, president of Volkswagen, with some understatement: "1960 will be the most interesting year in the history of the U.S. automobile industry."

Chevy's Ed Cole predicts that the 1960 compact cars will ring up 1,100,000 sales, lead the industry to within a bumper's reach of a 7,000,000-car year, the second biggest (first: 1955) in U.S. history. "A market of this size," says Cole, "should see sales of 300,000 Corvairs, 250,000 Falcons, 150,000 Valiants, 400,000 Studebaker Larks and American Ramblers, not counting bigger Rambler Ambassadors."

"It Helps Business." Who will buy the compacts? Detroit, which prides itself on having market surveys to answer almost any sales question, this time is stumped. Buyers have been unpredictable and have shown a notable disregard of polls telling them what they should like, especially that they liked bigger, chrome-decorated cars. Detroit guesses that the compacts will appeal particularly to people on tight budgets. But it is not certain, since consumers no longer buy cars to match their pocketbooks. Most buyers of the low-cost foreign cars and of the Rambler and Lark come from higher-income brackets.

Hopefully, Ed Cole says: "The bulk of compact-car sales will probably come from an expansion of the market." But he is well aware that the compacts are bound to cut into sales of existing models. "If our Corvair moves some other cars off the road, well, that's too bad. But any time we bring out something that gets the focus of attention, it helps business. Anything that stimulates interest in autos is bound to stimulate the economy."

For such stimulation, Chevy itself may pay a price. Some of autodom's biggest wheels reckon that one out of every five compact sales will come out of the standard models of Chevy, Plymouth or Ford. Atlanta Dealer Paul Timmers echoes what many a savvy salesman says: "The compacts are going to give us our Biggest year in 1960, but they will take away sales from our regular line."

The Corvair's factory list price of $1,860 is only $196 below Chevy's cheapest model, the Biscayne. But the spread will grow when it comes to the buyer's choice of extras. The Corvair handles so easily that it needs no power brakes or power steering, and its automatic shift, at $135, is $50 less than on Chevy models. Cole expects that many Corvair buyers will not even want the automatic shift, will prefer the stick shift on the floor to get back the "feel of driving." Thus the Corvair, with the minimum extras needed, will run several hundred dollars under the Biscayne, and as much as $2,000 under the most expensive car in Chevy's line, the Impala. One thing that will help Chevy salesmen is the fact that the Corvair will have only a four-door, seating six passengers, at the start. Next January Cole plans to bring out a two-door hardtop with a stepped-up engine designed for the sports-car type. Eventually, he hopes to bring out a station wagon.

If the compacts cut deeply into the present low-priced three, Detroit dopesters expect that they will certainly be bad news to what is left of the ailing middle-priced market. Says Cole: "The middle-priced field is sitting there with a gun to its head." Some middle-priced dealers have already pulled the trigger. New Orleans' leading Buick seller, Stephens Buick Co., fortnight ago surrendered its franchise and switched to Chevy.

Far greater worries plague the used-car dealers. They fear that the compacts, priced in the same range as late-model used cars, will wreck their market. If that happens, the market for new cars would be hard hit; if a motorist cannot get a fair price for his old car, he will not be eager to trade it in on a new car. On the other hand, some optimistic secondhand dealers argue that the buyer in the $2,000 class will prefer a roomy, late-model car to a compact. "The man who has been in the habit of buying a luxury car will not buy a compact," says Kansas City Salesman Henry Frick. "He'll still come to us --especially if he has a big family."

"Welcome Back." What will the new compacts do to those gnatty foreign bugs, which started the rush to smallness? "We never worry about competition," says Britain's Lord Rootes, whose Rootes Motors Ltd. makes Hillman, Singer, Sunbeam. "We welcome our American competitors back after the years in which they designed themselves out of the market."

Foreign makers view Detroit's shift as a return to normal size rather than a direct challenge to their cars. They figure that the new U.S. compacts--which run about 15 ft. long and start at about $1,800 list-will bite into the sales of regular U.S. cars, but are neither small enough nor economical enough to cut the sales of the fastest-selling smaller imports, which run about 10 ft. to 13 ft. and deliver in the $1,600 range. Foreign makers expect to benefit from Detroit's new emphasis on smallness; they hope to increase this year's exports of 600,000 cars to the U.S. to about 700,000 next year.

American Motors' President George Romney, whose hot-selling Ramblers sped the entry of the Big Three into the compact race and now hold a commanding lead, argues that the big companies will be in trouble from the moment they jump into the smaller-car field. But not Rambler. "We will make and sell more than 500,000 Rambler '60s." Studebaker-Packard also expects a lift for Lark, up about a third to 200,000 sales. "Of one thing I'm certain," says Romney, "the one who is not going to be hurt is the customer."

The U.S. customer will indeed get a long overdue break. The Corvair, the Falcon and Valiant are more than a shift to small cars; they also signal a shift in Detroit's auto-building philosophies, notably an end to years of emphasizing styling rather than mechanical changes. From now on, the big emphasis will be on mechanical improvements and innovations. The 80-h.p. Corvair has them aplenty. It gets 25 to 30 miles per gallon, can speed up to 88 m.p.h., and climb an ice-covered grade of 30DEG that would stop a standard car. Its flat "pancake" aluminum engine, which has six horizontally opposed cylinders (two banks of cylinders in a horizontal position), weighs only 332 Ibs. v. 600

Ibs. for Chevy's regular 170-h.p. to 230-h.p. cast-iron V8. Being air-cooled, it eliminates the water pump and radiator, does away with overheating and freezing, needs no antifreeze. Because the engine is aft, and combines there with the transmission and drive gears, there is no transmission hump in the floor. Because the front is light, Chevy says the car is easy to steer without power steering, gets better traction and braking.

Such claims have stirred up an angry argument. Ford contends that a rear-engine car tends to oversteer and veer out on curves because the greater part of its weight is in the rear. It has less luggage space--only 15.6 cu. ft. in the Corvair v. 24.5 cu. ft. for the Falcon and 24.9 cu. ft. for the Valiant. (But the Corvair has an optional folding rear seat, for $32.50 extra, that provides another 13.3 cu. ft. of luggage room in the back.) Many engineers insist that a rear engine is not practical on the basis of present knowledge for cars of more than 2,800 Ibs. (Corvair's weight: 2,375 Ibs.). G.M.'s forthcoming Buick and Oldsmobile compacts, which will be bigger than the Corvair, will have front engines.

"It Spells Simplicity." Whether front engine or rear, the compacts are all made to wipe out the longstanding complaints against U.S. car craftsmanship. "One reason that Europeans have achieved a reputation for excellent craftsmanship," says Cole, is that "their cars are relatively simple, but American cars have been getting more and more complicated." Cole has built a car whose six-cylinder engine has fewer parts than standard engines, is easily accessible, can be completely removed from the car in less than 30 minutes. "Everything about it spells simplicity," says Cole. "The engine is handy enough for any do-it-yourself mechanic. Because it is easier to build, I can guarantee you that our quality will stand up against anything from Europe."*

"This Is It." Perhaps the most remarkable thing about the Corvair is the way Cole designed it and sold the idea to General Motors. He put the Corvair wheels in motion way back in 1952, a most unlikely time. Detroit then was riding a crest of chrome, and it looked as if anyone who bucked the trend to bigness would get honked right out of the industry. Henry Kaiser's chromeless little Henry J. was a flop. Romney's Ramblers were losing money. Just a few years before, Chevy had started to tool for a compact model, the Cadet, then decided that the market was too small, and scrapped it. But Cole, at that time Chevy's chief engineer, saw farther. He figured that buyers would tire of size and flash. But since all the surveys were against him, Cole knew that he had to use the greatest skill and strategy to sell G.M.

He started to work on the small car in secret. It was fairly simple to roll down a tight security curtain because each of G.M.'s semi-sovereign divisions is constantly tinkering on its own far-out projects that it keeps under wraps to protect them from competitors or even from rival divisions.

With a dozen first-class engineers, Ed Cole for four years designed and discarded scores of wooden mockups. He tried everything: front engine with front-wheel drive, front engine with rear-wheel drive, rear engine with front-wheel drive, but he always returned to rear engines with rear-wheel drive. By the spring of 1956, when Cole's team produced a prototype power plant and suspension, he disguised it with a German Porsche body shell. One of Cole's friends recalls the scene that day at the Chevy Engineering Center. "Ed jumped in the car as if his pants were on fire. The speed limit at the test center is 25 m.p.h., but Ed sped around at 80. We kept closing our eyes and praying. Then he pulled up, and he could barely talk. He said three words: 'This is it.' "

"You've Got Something." Still he had to lick the biggest problem: winning approval from G.M.'s top management. In July of 1956, Ed Cole got a much freer rein to press the project: Chevy Boss Tom Keating moved up to head all G.M. passenger-car divisions, and Ed Cole replaced him as the Chevrolet general manager, became a G.M. vice president.

For another year Cole labored over his baby. Not only did he design thousands of parts, but he had to get cost estimates for each one from hundreds of suppliers --without springing the secret. His sales strategy was to outflank corporate channels, sell the small car directly to G.M.'s hard-reigning president, Harlow Curtice. But sharp, inquiring "Red" Curtice was a tough man to sell. To do it, Cole would have to present him with a prototype car and an argument virtually without flaw--at a carefully selected time when the market was just beginning to ripen. Cole well knew that Curtice could ask him hundreds of questions--and if he did not have all the answers, Curtice would veto the idea right there.

One day in September of 1957, Ed Cole casually asked Red Curtice out to take a look at something new at the G.M. Technical Center. With a knowing wink, Cole lifted the canvas protecting the clay mockup. Red Curtice stood back, his blue eyes narrowing. Then he peppered Cole for two hours with questions. There were many obvious problems.

Was there a market for such a car? Sure, look at the way the imported car sales were soaring. Cole also had his own secret Chevy surveys to show that people were buying the imports not just to be different, but because they wanted a fairly economical car that was easy to handle and park. Would G.M. have to spend a fortune to build such a car? Not really. Cole had drawn up a plan showing how existing Chevy plants could be converted to handle the job. What about aluminum for the engine? Cole knew exactly where to get it--and at the right price. Months before, G.M. had closed a deal to buy large amounts of aluminum for pistons and other parts from a new Reynolds Metals plant at Massena, N.Y. Chevy also was building a foundry just a mile away, was going to cart the molten aluminum there from the nearby Reynolds plant, and make it into aluminum parts--at a drastic reduction in costs. Chevy could get much more aluminum to cast into blocks for the engine. But wouldn't a small car overturn G.M.'s huge market for big cars? Cole's answer: "If we don't hurry up and build this car, someone else will." For a clincher, Ed Cole took Red Curtice for a spin in the test model. Said Curtice, who was not easy to impress: "I think you've got something there Ed."

"I Won't Tell." With Curtice's backing, Cole's small car smoothly rode through G.M.'s board in December 1957. But secrecy remained just as tight, even though orders went out to toolmakers. To camouflage the project, Chevy asked them to deliver engine and body dies for a new "Holden," the car made by G.M.'s Australian subsidiary. In trial runs, G.M. tricked up test models with phony grilles, bumpers and side panels, with Porsche or English Vauxhall body shells, drove them more than 2,000,000 miles. One prototype spun through Colorado's rugged Rockies. At the wheel: Ed Cole.

Several months after Chevy got started, Ford and Chrysler cranked up their own small cars. Soon the small-car race broke into open, friendly needling between Cole and his neighbor, Chrysler Executive Vice President William Newberg. 48, who ramrods Valiant. "How about giving me a ride in that Corvair?'' asked Newberg one day. "Sorry, Bill, I can't," replied Cole. "C'mon, Ed, I won't tell anybody." Retorted Cole: "It's not that, Bill. Our little car is so good I'm afraid it would give you a heart attack."

"Listen!" Edward Nicholas Cole displayed his consuming love for cars--in a curious way--even as a farm boy back in compact Marne, Mich. (1959 pop. 300). At five, he hopped into the family's 1908 Buick, began toying with levers--and smashed it into a tree. He also showed a tremendous capacity for work. Rising by the dawn's early light, he milked 20 cows, bottled the milk and delivered it before school. The milk route taught him to hustle ("Because the load becomes lighter"), and it also taught him that a touch of extra service can win customers. He built a snowplow, hitched a horse to it and in the winter cleared his customers' driveways. Summers he hawked Ford tractors to farmers, found that the best way to sell was to demonstrate the plows himself; he would plow the farmers' land, and the farmers figured that if young Ed could do it that easily, so could they. He earned $600 a summer. Winters he built and sold radios. He also rebuilt two nearly wrecked cars, thus became, at 16, one of Marne's rare two-car owners.

Setting out to be a lawyer, Cole went through Grand Rapids Junior College. But he switched to the General Motors Institute to earn while he learned--a month in a Cadillac plant, a month in class studying mechanical engineering. Cadillac thought him so bright that it hired him as a full-time engineer in 1933. Cole celebrated by marrying his home-town sweetheart, blonde, blue-eyed Esther Engman.

But she often had to take a back seat to Cole's first love: the Cadillac engine. Even at parties Cole slipped out to his car to tinker with it. Once, working to tone down engine noise, Cole tiptoed into a party while everyone was standing around a piano and singing. He hauled out his longtime crony, Harry Barr, now Chevy's chief engineer. Said Cole, starting the car, "Listen!" Barr listened, said it sounded fine, and went back in to sing. But Cole stayed outside, listening to his engine music all night. "That," says Barr, "was the way Ed went to parties."

Ed Cole, good mechanic, soon got a reputation as a Mr. Fix-It. Through the '30s Cole made giant strides in reducing engine noise and solving problems of engine cooling. The U.S. Army, whose tanks were regularly breaking down from engine over heating, grew attentive. Just before Pearl Harbor, Cole got his toughest job: developing a new rear engine for the Army's M-5 light tank in 90 days. Cole beat the deadline, and during the war Cadillac built 12,500 M-55. After the war, Cadillac assigned Cole to apply his tank know-how to building an experimental rear-engine Cadillac. It was a weird monster, with the engine in the back seat and dual rear tires. But during the icy winter of 1945-46 while his neighbors' cars skidded around the driveways, Cole's sped off with sure-handed ease. That car proved to Cole "that the rear engine provides better steering and handling on slippery roads.'' But it also showed him that a rear engine for a big car posed enormous problems.

G.M. was not yet ready to gamble on a rear engine. One reason: Cole, working together with Cadillac Chief John Gordon (now G.M.'s president), developed a new short-stroke V-8 front engine with an increased compression. It proved so successful that it set the basic design for most of G.M.'s high-compression engines now in use. It was 221 Ibs. lighter (25%) than the Caddy's previous power plant, yet stepped up power by 7% to 160 h.p., and stretched fuel economy at first by 15%--and eventually to 19 miles per gallon. But Cole still hankered to perfect a rear engine for cars. In his spare time he designed a tank powered by an air-cooled, horizontally opposed engine (the same kind as in the Corvair). When the Korean war broke out, the Army grabbed the plan for its T-41 tank, and Cole was made boss of Cadillac's huge plant in Cleveland. There his idea of building a rear-engine small car took shape. Every night in his room at the Lake Shore Hotel, he bent over a drafting board, littered the floor with sketches. The idea seemed to have no chance, since big Cadillac had no plans to produce a small car. But bigger G.M. had plans for Ed Cole.

"Leave Your Keys." The Chevy Division was bucking a problem most uncommon in Detroit: it had grown too conservative. Chugging along on what was basically a 1937 engine, the division was losing out to competition. Sales had slipped from 1,517,609 cars in 1950 to 871,503 in 1952. G.M. President Charlie Wilson grew worried, offered to give Chevy Boss Thomas Keating anything or anyone to pep up Chevy. Said Tom Keating: "I want Ed Cole." Red Curtice, then G.M.'s executive vice president, sent a hurry call to Cole, told him of his promotion to chief engineer of Chevy. Startled, Cole asked: "How soon do you want me to wrap things up in Cleveland?" Replied Red Curtice: "Just leave your keys on my desk as you go out."

Cole rapidly began to build his own team--the team that was to build Corvair --and he laid plans to triple Chevy's 851-man engineering staff. Just a few weeks after Cole moved in, G.M. held a top executive planning session, and Board Chairman Alfred Sloan Jr. demanded unexpectedly: "What about Chevy?" It was the kind of moment that every aggressive young executive dreams about. Cole replied with cool confidence: "I just happen to have some plans for expanding Chevrolet engineering, and I'm ready to show them any time you wish." G.M. appreciates that kind of action. Quipped Charlie Wilson to Cole: "I'll bet that's the first time you ever had your plans approved without submitting them." Cole's staff grew to 2,900 engineers.

In just 15 weeks Cole and his crew designed a V-8 that cut the weight of the basic Chevy engine from 550 Ibs. to 506 Ibs., but increased power from 123 h.p. to 162 h.p. "We did not build a test model because there was not time to experiment," Cole recalls. "That's how crazy and confident we were." The engine proved to have bugs. But it also had zip, and when the bugs were eliminated, the zip gave Chevy sales a push.

"A Little Intrigue." A devoted sports-car fan, Cole also volunteered to develop the sporty Corvette when no other G.M. division wanted it. "The Corvette gave the whole Chevy Division a little intrigue, and, believe me, we needed intrigue," says Cole, who likes to use the word "intrigue" to connote sex appeal and daring. Cole still enjoys running Corvettes around Chevy's test tracks at 115 m.p.h. He also ordered a 30% speedup in the escalators of Chevy's new engineering center; engineers call them the "turnpikes."

This year Cole's Chevy Division will produce nearly 1,500,000 cars, 27% of the U.S. total and more than either West Germany or Britain made in 1958. It will gobble up more steel (4,000,000-plus tons) than Sweden makes. Its sales (retail: $3.5 billion) are double the gross national product of Ireland.

Ed Cole drives himself as fast as he can. He steps out of bed at 6 a.m., putters around his garden (orchids, Ficus, dracaena and billbergia plants), has a breakfast of cereal and fruit, hops into a black Impala hardtop. He drives the 30 miles from his home in Bloomfield Hills to his Detroit office in 35 minutes, arriving at 8:10 sharp. In a typical day Cole averages a conference almost every half hour, drives more than 150 miles to various Chevy plants, is rarely home before 7 p.m. Like any good mechanic. Cole applies preventive maintenance. He neither drinks nor smokes, carefully watches his calories and cholesterol.

For his job, Cole's salary and bonus approach $300,000. He likes to spend it, lives in a palatial $250,000 stone-and-glass lakeside house, dresses in hand-needled $175 suits that have fancy cuffs on the sleeves. With Wife Esther, Son David, 22 (an engineering student at Michigan), and Daughter Martha, 18 (a freshman at Michigan State), he shares three boats, four Chevies (one for each member of the family) and five TV-sets (two in color), which Cole watches "only to see if I can sharpen up the Chevy commercials."

For the family it is usually life without Father. Saturdays he hops out to the Chevy proving grounds, nights and Sundays he buries himself under three to four hours of homework. Any hour of day or night, dealers and customers phone him for counsel. In the middle of the night recently, a weeping woman phoned from Minneapolis, said that she was tired of living in sin. But the man refused to marry her until he got the Chevy that he had ordered for a honeymoon trip. Please, couldn't Mr. Cole do something for her? He did.

Swinging around to the dealers, Cole travels about 100,000 air miles a year. He has won their respect and hearty backing by listening to their problems, trying to correct one of their big complaints--poor assembly-line workmanship. He likes to inspect the Chevies in showrooms and on the lots, peers under hoods, checks the chrome, looks hard for water leaks. On occasion, he has flown in a team of engineers from Detroit to replace all faulty parts. Time and again, dealers give him their highest possible accolade; they bubble that "when Ed Cole talks to you, he makes you feel like you're talking to another dealer." Such loyalty will not hurt Ed Cole in the coming battle of the compacts and the swift changes ahead for the entire auto market.

"Era of Specific Needs." What the auto industry is rolling into now, says Ed Cole, is "the era of specific driving needs." More and more Americans want a big car for big driving jobs, a small runabout for short hops. Thus, having long since realized the dream of a car for almost every family, the U.S. now is sweeping toward two cars in every garage. The compacts are speeding up the trend, since two Corvairs can be bought for the price of the biggest dressed-up Chevy.

Four years ago 4,800,000 U.S. families owned two cars or more. Today 7,000,000 do--and there are 350,000 three-car families. By 1965, more than 10 million families will have at least two cars. With the population growing fast, and the demand for special-purpose, personal transportation growing even faster, Ed Cole believes that auto sales in the U.S. will ride up steadily to 8,000,000 in the mid-1960s. More than that, in at least one year before 1970, the U.S. will sell an awesome 10 million cars.

*Hearing that, Detroit wags recalled the time when Big Bill Knudsen, G.M.'s late president, boasted to Adman Bruce Barton that a certain new-model Chevy was "almost the perfect low-priced car--and it will really become perfect next year when we make one small change." Barton bit hard. "What change?" Deadpanned Bill Knudsen: "We're just going to hang a small hammock under the chassis. Catch all the goddam parts that fall out."

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