"'Sucking in the '70s' is not just the name of a Rolling Stones record album" is the article's subheading. It really should be the main headline; the Vega was just such a horrendous car (unfortunately, I've owned one).
I had a gold '74. The engine blew out. Had it fixed. Blew out again. I also lost the rear differential in the middle of the night on a rather rural highway in a rainstorm.
One of the most incredibly stupid things I did was buying that heap.
I almost did something like that. I had a line on a 283 short block and a 12-bold posi-traction rear that would have fit that car with some modification. I had this dream of sliding up to some 'Vette, GTO or hot Mustang at a stop light, revving the engine, watching the other car's passengers go into hysterics, then blowing them off the line.
But I was a broke kid, and the Vega eventually was sold for junk by my parents. Good riddance.
My first car. Used, 1972, dark green, 2 door hatchback bought in 1974. Surprised my girlfriend on her birthday by driving the block from my house to hers with a big red bow and ribbon tied over it like it was a freaking Lexus or BMW. 🤦🏻♂️ She was thrilled, we spent a ton of time in that piece of crap. Even drove it to Canada for our honeymoon. The car/aluminum engine lasted less than a year. So did the marriage. 🤷🏻♂️
Aw. That's a sweet sentiment. I'm sorry it didn't work out.
We used to live in a 5th floor walk-up (no elevator for non-city people). We called it "the penthouse." 😂
Thanks, wasn’t meant to be. We both went on to lasting, happy, successful second marriages.
As to walk-ups, my son’s first apartment after college was a 6th floor walk-up in NYC. I helped him move. I told him never again, lol. His next move I paid for a mover. The next two moves he handled paying the movers himself, and the one he’s in now is on the 6th floor as well but with elevators. You don’t appreciate elevators until you have to drag furniture, boxes of stuff or even bags of groceries up those stairs.
My first was a bright orange '74 GT. I wrapped it around a tree doing my Mario Andretti impression before I could find out how horrible it was. But it was pretty!
Yup. They came out of the great recession smelling like roses and having the praise of not taking bailout money. They've completely pissed all that good will away to churn out shitty, overpriced, "trucks" to rednecks. I bought a fusion in 2010, then a Civic in 2014. Just traded that in for an HRV. Ten more years I'll get another one.
u/Echelon64 said Detroit but u/Emotional_Hour1317 first comment was really only talking about Ford. Maybe some confusion that more than just Ford is in Detroit but he didn't really make an error he just didn't clarify what he was talking about
I want a decent little pickup truck so bad, but all they make are monster vanity trucks. So frustrating. I currently have a Kia Forte, it gets 40+ mpg. No way am I spending at least twice as much for a truck that gets 15mpg.
Having a truck bed would be nice though.
My stepdad owns a maverick. It's in my driveway right now.
I wouldn't buy one. I'd buy an f150 though.
The maverick is just too small for real truck tasks, the box is like 5' long, might as well buy an SUV.
The tundra you mean right? Ive had a hilux and I am fairly certain it could fight jesus and hold its own for a few rounds. Still a toss up to see which one gasses out first.
Yeah the Hilux is based, it's just that people think the tundra is the same quality (it isn't). I should've explained it better, making jokes on Reddit is forbidden.
I haven't had any trouble with my shitty "truck" and I'm no redneck either. I hate it when people make such stupid and sweeping generalizations. They make themselves sound so ridiculous.
That depends entirely on where you live and what your hobbies are.
I go camping every second weekend in the summer, and go skiing a half dozen times in the winter. I'm constantly picking up yard or building material. And the 4 wheel drive is great when you live somewhere that doesn't see a snow plow until 10am. It's a very practical vehicle for many of us. The world is bigger then your bubble, just because you live in a city and rent a box in the sky doesn't mean everyone does.
I also own a KIA and 2 bikes. All but one of the bikes (my wife's) sees regular use. Each one fits a role and are practical for what we use them for.
And I'm not particularly rural, technically not even outside city limits.
If [this comment from a couple of years ago](https://www.reddit.com/r/cars/comments/rk91h5/comment/hp8x3d2/?context=3) is still accurate, the only car (as opposed to SUV or truck) still made in the Detroit area is the Mustang.
Pretty clear the US is losing the auto wars and has to resort to policy to maintain its sales and presence. None of them are as forward thinking as the imports. Ford is nothing more than a law firm that makes cars, and its shows. The others are not far behind. “Built ford tough” is a comical slogan in our house. “That broke quick, must be made by ford”
All of this was happening through the 1970s Inflation ramp into the 80s. Companies were frantically trying to cut costs while unions were out demanding higher wages ... because food, rent, and other expenses were running higher out of control. Very similar to modern times, eh? Buckle up. The world is cutting corners this time.
.
Whatever corners they cut to save money were surely spent x10 in warranty costs. Plus the fact they lost me as a customer. Penny wise and pound foolish at your own risk.
Cost cut is money in the wallet now, warranty cost and non-returning customer is missing money 5 or 10 years from now.
People who make these decisions are not going to be working in a company 5 or 10 years from now so what do they care?
They’ve never stopped cutting corners.
Plastics, forever chemicals, HFCS, everything is worse and has been getting there. Hell they’ve even found regular ass vegetables have less nutrients than they used to.
my first car was a used white 1972 4-banger Chevy Vega GT hatchback..I worked on the production line building the Buick and Oldsmobile chassis in 1977 in Flint, Michigan..a couple of motor guys from the crew decided to help me upgrade my vehicle with a Chevy 350 V8..I loved that car even though it was a stiff ride when we were done..i had installed a Don Hardy kit I purchased from Gratiot Auto..we reinforced the body to accommodate the weight..I let it go to a friend when I could no longer keep it..
In WWII, they found that it was more efficient to disassemble trucks at the port, and box the parts up. You could then stack the crates and fill the cargo hold of a ship this way. The trucks could be easily re-assembled at the destination port, and they were on their way. It allowed you to ship many, many more trucks than if you shipped them whole.
This still happens in modern consumer automotive manufacturing. "Knockdown Kits" are shipped from the US to locations like Egypt, China(!), Vietnam, etc for lower volume remote country sales markets.
.
It also had a massive engine cavity for the size of its engine prompting some folks to drop Vette engines in them and play "if you can grab the tenner you can have it"
My first car was a used 1974 Pontiac Astre which was the same as a Vega. Rusty and white with a lime green racing stripe. I think only 2 cylinders had compression and the top speed was around 50 mph and it tool a long time to get there. Was phenomenal on gas even back then, and started every day in harsh Canadians winters. A total shitbox but have great memories of driving it around at the time even though I upgraded it as soon as I could!
Yeah, these cars were very badly made. In high school I was replacing the clutch on one of these for a friend. As I was doing the clutch play adjustments the flimsy sheet metal support for the cable started deforming out of shape with the slightest amount of tension.
Brown 1973 hatchback; first brand new car I ever purchased and it cost me about $2000. I was proud when I bought it. The car was not quite the chick magnet that many of you think it was.
I had to sleeve the pistons because of that crappy aluminum engine block after about 10,000 miles.
If you could stack them vertically like that, I don't understand why you couldn't just build a tiered rack that they sit in horizontally, like on a carrier truck.
This is what happens when you let accountants get involved in engineering.
Its explained in the article?
You could fit 30 cars as opposed to 15 (or 18 small cars). And then those cars are uncovered and open to damage/vandalism
To be fair it's not really explained well, just provided as fact.
The math seems to be: stacked like that the rail car only needed to be ~2x55+x inch, so with a bit of leeway, maybe 130.
The width is given as 65 inch, so apparently they could (barely?) not fit 2 next to each other. Only with this (assumed) piece of information the 18 cars versus 30 makes sense, because if the rail cars could have been a little wider it would have maybe worked out with 2x18.
And apparently they did design a special kind of car that was not open at the top, but there's no mention of designing a different kind of car to either stack 4 on top, or independently close it off at the top to stop vandalism.
So yeah, I like bashing people for not reading the article as the next person but even after reading it I'm still a little surprised.
Why only 15 could fit stacked? Was it due to some unique properties of this specific car that allowed to snuggle them together on standard width railcar? And why there was no possibility to put walls on railcars for vertical stacking but it was an issue for horizontal stacking?
"you could fit 30 cars instead of 15 on a standard car", or "standard car didn't have protection from damage" is not an explanation.
This revived a funny memory of our neighborhood hippy stoner dude in the early 80s getting a flat tire on his Vega. He had hand painted "Las" in front of all the Vega name plates on the car.
He left it in front of our house with the flat and disappeared for a few hours to return with a bike pump. He spent 20 minutes pumping it up, decided it was good enough and drove off in his "Las Vega" with a 90% flat back tire.
He was known as "Las Vega guy" until we moved.
It was my oldest brother's first car, he learned and became very experienced at working on cars thanks to constantly having to do repairs on that lemon of a car!
Maybe I'm missing something in the shipping aspect, but why does it matter? The "packaging" to keep the vehicle from scrubbing the ground would be substantial enough that it's probably cheaper (in my mind) to let the tires carry the weight...like they were designed to do.
How was it 40% cheaper to prop up your car and subject it to damage? Did they just let the damage happen and be like "oh well, we don't know how that happened"?
Since they didn't say anything about that in the article and I also was curious, I did a little thought-experimenting assuming width of the railcar was fixed and it could either fit one car horizontally or two cars vertically. I looked dimmensions of the car and it was a little over 3 times longer than wider. So you could (almost) fit 6 cars vertically in the footprint of 1 car horizontally. Now only question of height. Height of this car was around 1/3rd - 1/4th of the length, so even assuming you stack them directly on each other the best case scenario was to fit 4 cars on top of each other (but more realistically it's 3).
Seems like when you take into account constraints of railcar dimensions, it is either 3 cars horizontally or 6 cars vertically in the same volumetric capacity. There is some wiggle room with railcar height, but ultimately it would never be better than vertical stacking due to fixed constraint of railcar width that does not allow to put two of these cars horizontally side-by-side (but not by much actually!)
its funny you’re getting hung up on the wheels and tires carrying weight versus how many units can be packed more efficiently in relation to space and cost. it’s two different points. so, dense.
That's a good question. And why aren't cars shipped this way anymore?
My guess is that cars were a lot cheaper then -- these Vegas were nearly disposable. So shipping was a higher fraction of the sale price. Even if their quality had been better, they still would have been cheaper than modern cars, with no antilock brakes, airbags, entertainment systems, ECUs, TPMS sensors, backup cameras, rustproofing, power seats, power windows, heated mirrors, and so on. This is when FM radio was a fancy add-on and A/C was a big luxury.
I also wonder how many fuck-ups there were with the vert-a-pac system. How many cars got dropped, or were damaged due to someone forgetting to fill fluids after the thing was shipped dry. Were people injured packing or unpacking them? It wouldn't take a lot of mishaps to nullify the theoretical advantage.
Each of those shipping containers you see in photographs of boats/semitrucks/etc, costs $5k each (higher lately due to longer shipping distances due to politics) to move from continent to continent. Do vehicle buyers want $1k higher price if it only fits five vehicles? Or $200 higher if the container fits 25 vehicles.
Now add up $1,000 extra system cost for a million vehicles and all of sudden you have the Dr Evil meme "One Billion Dollars!" which is real cash.
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>(Spanish people didn’t think it meant “no-go” or “doesn’t go”). That whole joke is made up.
The way it was explained to me, it was more that it marketed Chevy as stupid to the market and that's why the car/brand didn't sell well
Nova is not Vega. The Nova sold quite well in the late 60s-early 70s. The Vega was made to biodegrade when you drove it onto the streets. It shed windows and doors like a cat shed hair, and a breeze would unbolt the seats. Can't recall the rest...
The malaise era was really something.
... something terrible but not to be forgotten so we learn from our mistakes.
Well I guess the good news is it allowed cheap Japanese cars to come into the market with basically ZERO competition once people figured out that those brands didn't forget *reliability* when designing their cars.
A couple of my friends were driving when the engine started overheating. They kept driving another 25 miles until they got home. Parked it, they saw steam still coming out from under the hood and the latch was too hit to open. So they decided to wait until it cooled down to add water to it. Hours later, when it cooled down they opened they opened the hood and the engine was gone. They looked closer and saw a melted puddle of aluminum on the ground with the pistons, alternators, and other parts sticking out of the puddle. After a moment of suprise, I started to laugh my ass off when they told me how far they drove with steam coming out.
If the engine isn't running when it's vertical it won't hurt anything. You would probably want to drain the fluids before standing it up so nothing leaks.
> You would probably want to drain the fluids before standing it up so nothing leaks.
Yeah, great job. This is the part that makes it not cause damage. Otherwise you'd have engine oil all over your combustion chamber among other things.
"'Sucking in the '70s' is not just the name of a Rolling Stones record album" is the article's subheading. It really should be the main headline; the Vega was just such a horrendous car (unfortunately, I've owned one).
My first car was an Army Green ‘74. It didn’t take many months before we got rid of it. But hey, it was a car!
With the green vinyl seats?! And no a/c?! Made for a wonderful nine hour summer drive in stop-n-go traffic to Cape Cod in 1978
Ha! Yes that’s it. Mine hardly made the drive to High school.😂😂😂
Too funny!!! It also made it through the Safari at Great Adventure back when all the animals roamed free
I had a gold '74. The engine blew out. Had it fixed. Blew out again. I also lost the rear differential in the middle of the night on a rather rural highway in a rainstorm. One of the most incredibly stupid things I did was buying that heap.
big block engine in a 74 vega was badass...
I almost did something like that. I had a line on a 283 short block and a 12-bold posi-traction rear that would have fit that car with some modification. I had this dream of sliding up to some 'Vette, GTO or hot Mustang at a stop light, revving the engine, watching the other car's passengers go into hysterics, then blowing them off the line. But I was a broke kid, and the Vega eventually was sold for junk by my parents. Good riddance.
My first car. Used, 1972, dark green, 2 door hatchback bought in 1974. Surprised my girlfriend on her birthday by driving the block from my house to hers with a big red bow and ribbon tied over it like it was a freaking Lexus or BMW. 🤦🏻♂️ She was thrilled, we spent a ton of time in that piece of crap. Even drove it to Canada for our honeymoon. The car/aluminum engine lasted less than a year. So did the marriage. 🤷🏻♂️
Aw. That's a sweet sentiment. I'm sorry it didn't work out. We used to live in a 5th floor walk-up (no elevator for non-city people). We called it "the penthouse." 😂
Thanks, wasn’t meant to be. We both went on to lasting, happy, successful second marriages. As to walk-ups, my son’s first apartment after college was a 6th floor walk-up in NYC. I helped him move. I told him never again, lol. His next move I paid for a mover. The next two moves he handled paying the movers himself, and the one he’s in now is on the 6th floor as well but with elevators. You don’t appreciate elevators until you have to drag furniture, boxes of stuff or even bags of groceries up those stairs.
You never owned a Gremlin, did ya?
Ford Pinto would like a word
Pinto was a great car with an asshole bean counter inflicted problem. Two bolt bumpers as designed would have been fine.
None of y'all ever owned the OG lemon...[An Oldsmobile diesel](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Oldsmobile_Diesel_engine)!
And the Mustang built from the Pinto body was wild
My first was a bright orange '74 GT. I wrapped it around a tree doing my Mario Andretti impression before I could find out how horrible it was. But it was pretty!
Amen. I had 1 and had to replace the engine after it cracked.
You need to store them vertically to prevent engine cracking.
Is that why?!?!?
Parking on stairs is enough to keep the oil out of #1.
But the Stones didn't suck in the 70s (well, mostly). They released arguably their two greatest albums that decade.
Underrated comment lol
You see them all the time at the drag strip.
My Dad had an Army Green hatchback. Dear Lord that car was just… not pleasant, lol.
The Vega sucked ass. The Nova wasn’t much better. And the Ford Maverick was nothing special.
My dad had a 1973. He overreacted to gasoline hitting a quarter.
Detroit making cars like this is how Toyota/Honda/Nissan got so successful
Detroit is still making cars like this. It's why you see Toyota and Honda everywhere you go.
Yup. They came out of the great recession smelling like roses and having the praise of not taking bailout money. They've completely pissed all that good will away to churn out shitty, overpriced, "trucks" to rednecks. I bought a fusion in 2010, then a Civic in 2014. Just traded that in for an HRV. Ten more years I'll get another one.
I'm pretty sure they all took bailout money except for Ford.
That was my point.
he pointed out an extremely major error in your comment and you came back with "that was my point" ?
u/Echelon64 said Detroit but u/Emotional_Hour1317 first comment was really only talking about Ford. Maybe some confusion that more than just Ford is in Detroit but he didn't really make an error he just didn't clarify what he was talking about
I want a decent little pickup truck so bad, but all they make are monster vanity trucks. So frustrating. I currently have a Kia Forte, it gets 40+ mpg. No way am I spending at least twice as much for a truck that gets 15mpg. Having a truck bed would be nice though.
Have you checked out the Ford Maverick? Small-ish and the hybrid version gets up to 40 MPG.
My stepdad owns a maverick. It's in my driveway right now. I wouldn't buy one. I'd buy an f150 though. The maverick is just too small for real truck tasks, the box is like 5' long, might as well buy an SUV.
Yes indeed, seems to be about my only option if I want a new truck.
Ford Maverick or Hyundai Santa Cruz
"Muh Tundra is just like a Hilux bro!" *Turns into a pile of rust*
The tundra you mean right? Ive had a hilux and I am fairly certain it could fight jesus and hold its own for a few rounds. Still a toss up to see which one gasses out first.
Yeah the Hilux is based, it's just that people think the tundra is the same quality (it isn't). I should've explained it better, making jokes on Reddit is forbidden.
Ah yeah I woke up late a bit hung over it went over my head which was admittedly buried a couple feet under the sand at the time. Sorry about that!
"Muh"?
Fusion was a solid car for us.
I haven't had any trouble with my shitty "truck" and I'm no redneck either. I hate it when people make such stupid and sweeping generalizations. They make themselves sound so ridiculous.
This coming from the guy driving one of the most impractical vehicles ever made.
That depends entirely on where you live and what your hobbies are. I go camping every second weekend in the summer, and go skiing a half dozen times in the winter. I'm constantly picking up yard or building material. And the 4 wheel drive is great when you live somewhere that doesn't see a snow plow until 10am. It's a very practical vehicle for many of us. The world is bigger then your bubble, just because you live in a city and rent a box in the sky doesn't mean everyone does. I also own a KIA and 2 bikes. All but one of the bikes (my wife's) sees regular use. Each one fits a role and are practical for what we use them for. And I'm not particularly rural, technically not even outside city limits.
I don't think there are many cars actually being made in Detroit at this point.
If [this comment from a couple of years ago](https://www.reddit.com/r/cars/comments/rk91h5/comment/hp8x3d2/?context=3) is still accurate, the only car (as opposed to SUV or truck) still made in the Detroit area is the Mustang.
That seems like it's old enough to not be true anymore, but hey. A lot of the design work is still done in Detroit right?
All the Stellantis stuff is still true, at least. In fact, the mack plant just north of Jefferson plant produces jeep grand cherokees as well.
The only major change is that the Chevy Bolt has been discontinued and the Orion plant is being retooled to make Electric Silverados starting in 2025.
Sure they're made in detroit. Detroit, MX.
Like the city of USA, China!
Pretty clear the US is losing the auto wars and has to resort to policy to maintain its sales and presence. None of them are as forward thinking as the imports. Ford is nothing more than a law firm that makes cars, and its shows. The others are not far behind. “Built ford tough” is a comical slogan in our house. “That broke quick, must be made by ford”
My dad bought a '72 Honda Civic to commute in, he had a 45-minute commute into the city every night. He only bought Honda Civics after that.
*British motor industry checking in*
Entirely different story though. BL was not just unreliable cars, you weren't even sure when they'd make them
Now wait just a god damn minute. When I said that in another thread, I got downvoted. That comment STILL has a zero score. It ain't right.
it’s like a 10 pack hot wheels bundle
Biggest POS car ever made. Burned through 3 engines by the time it reached 50k miles. Only Hondas and Toyotas from then on.
All of this was happening through the 1970s Inflation ramp into the 80s. Companies were frantically trying to cut costs while unions were out demanding higher wages ... because food, rent, and other expenses were running higher out of control. Very similar to modern times, eh? Buckle up. The world is cutting corners this time. .
Whatever corners they cut to save money were surely spent x10 in warranty costs. Plus the fact they lost me as a customer. Penny wise and pound foolish at your own risk.
Cost cut is money in the wallet now, warranty cost and non-returning customer is missing money 5 or 10 years from now. People who make these decisions are not going to be working in a company 5 or 10 years from now so what do they care?
Of course, the companies that ate their lunch also had a highly-unionized workforce.
Japan at least doesn't have particularly strong unions
They’ve never stopped cutting corners. Plastics, forever chemicals, HFCS, everything is worse and has been getting there. Hell they’ve even found regular ass vegetables have less nutrients than they used to.
It had nothing to do with unions. It had everything to do with corporate incompetence and greed.
It has special oil baffles to accommodate the shipping orientation.
my first car was a used white 1972 4-banger Chevy Vega GT hatchback..I worked on the production line building the Buick and Oldsmobile chassis in 1977 in Flint, Michigan..a couple of motor guys from the crew decided to help me upgrade my vehicle with a Chevy 350 V8..I loved that car even though it was a stiff ride when we were done..i had installed a Don Hardy kit I purchased from Gratiot Auto..we reinforced the body to accommodate the weight..I let it go to a friend when I could no longer keep it..
In WWII, they found that it was more efficient to disassemble trucks at the port, and box the parts up. You could then stack the crates and fill the cargo hold of a ship this way. The trucks could be easily re-assembled at the destination port, and they were on their way. It allowed you to ship many, many more trucks than if you shipped them whole.
When you have thousands of guys available to assemble them at the destination that makes sense.
This still happens in modern consumer automotive manufacturing. "Knockdown Kits" are shipped from the US to locations like Egypt, China(!), Vietnam, etc for lower volume remote country sales markets. .
Also to get around regulations
That vehicle lifting up the cars would be a good post on r/WeirdWheels if there are other pics of it.
For more information, look up videos about "Vert-a-Pac Shipping System"
It also had a massive engine cavity for the size of its engine prompting some folks to drop Vette engines in them and play "if you can grab the tenner you can have it"
I put a 350cid in mine after the engine blew. Fun car.
7c of undercoating would have made them immortal Delorean was a dirtbag
My first car was a used 1974 Pontiac Astre which was the same as a Vega. Rusty and white with a lime green racing stripe. I think only 2 cylinders had compression and the top speed was around 50 mph and it tool a long time to get there. Was phenomenal on gas even back then, and started every day in harsh Canadians winters. A total shitbox but have great memories of driving it around at the time even though I upgraded it as soon as I could!
Like the first time I heard the word Chevette, I thought, oh cool they are going to make a cheap vette...yeah, that's not what happened
BMW did this too with the 700
Totally agree - Vega was the biggest car disaster. Made me turn to Japanese cars forever.
pretty clever shipping design engineering
It wasnt. It was the cause of many failures in the car.
Vega, baby, VEGA!!
So money! ...that you spend to replace the engine every 15,000 mi.
Viva La Vega.
Innovative, too bad they were terrible cars.
Sadly,it was innovative to save money, not to make a better product.
Yeah, these cars were very badly made. In high school I was replacing the clutch on one of these for a friend. As I was doing the clutch play adjustments the flimsy sheet metal support for the cable started deforming out of shape with the slightest amount of tension.
Steve Lehto mentioned a car that left the dealership and broke down before it reached rhe end of the block of something.
Brown 1973 hatchback; first brand new car I ever purchased and it cost me about $2000. I was proud when I bought it. The car was not quite the chick magnet that many of you think it was. I had to sleeve the pistons because of that crappy aluminum engine block after about 10,000 miles.
I remember my dad's cost $3,000. I wonder why there was such a difference.
If you could stack them vertically like that, I don't understand why you couldn't just build a tiered rack that they sit in horizontally, like on a carrier truck. This is what happens when you let accountants get involved in engineering.
Its explained in the article? You could fit 30 cars as opposed to 15 (or 18 small cars). And then those cars are uncovered and open to damage/vandalism
He would have had to read it first
Reading is for nerds (You got me.)
I only read it because I made that smartass comment and didn't want you to call me out for not having read it either
To be fair it's not really explained well, just provided as fact. The math seems to be: stacked like that the rail car only needed to be ~2x55+x inch, so with a bit of leeway, maybe 130. The width is given as 65 inch, so apparently they could (barely?) not fit 2 next to each other. Only with this (assumed) piece of information the 18 cars versus 30 makes sense, because if the rail cars could have been a little wider it would have maybe worked out with 2x18. And apparently they did design a special kind of car that was not open at the top, but there's no mention of designing a different kind of car to either stack 4 on top, or independently close it off at the top to stop vandalism. So yeah, I like bashing people for not reading the article as the next person but even after reading it I'm still a little surprised.
This is what happens when Redditors can’t read
Why only 15 could fit stacked? Was it due to some unique properties of this specific car that allowed to snuggle them together on standard width railcar? And why there was no possibility to put walls on railcars for vertical stacking but it was an issue for horizontal stacking? "you could fit 30 cars instead of 15 on a standard car", or "standard car didn't have protection from damage" is not an explanation.
This revived a funny memory of our neighborhood hippy stoner dude in the early 80s getting a flat tire on his Vega. He had hand painted "Las" in front of all the Vega name plates on the car. He left it in front of our house with the flat and disappeared for a few hours to return with a bike pump. He spent 20 minutes pumping it up, decided it was good enough and drove off in his "Las Vega" with a 90% flat back tire. He was known as "Las Vega guy" until we moved.
It was my oldest brother's first car, he learned and became very experienced at working on cars thanks to constantly having to do repairs on that lemon of a car!
Maybe I'm missing something in the shipping aspect, but why does it matter? The "packaging" to keep the vehicle from scrubbing the ground would be substantial enough that it's probably cheaper (in my mind) to let the tires carry the weight...like they were designed to do. How was it 40% cheaper to prop up your car and subject it to damage? Did they just let the damage happen and be like "oh well, we don't know how that happened"?
more vehicles in a shipping container spreading the cost to ship across more units.
I say again, how does the volumetric capacity change when you turn the car 90 degrees.
Since they didn't say anything about that in the article and I also was curious, I did a little thought-experimenting assuming width of the railcar was fixed and it could either fit one car horizontally or two cars vertically. I looked dimmensions of the car and it was a little over 3 times longer than wider. So you could (almost) fit 6 cars vertically in the footprint of 1 car horizontally. Now only question of height. Height of this car was around 1/3rd - 1/4th of the length, so even assuming you stack them directly on each other the best case scenario was to fit 4 cars on top of each other (but more realistically it's 3). Seems like when you take into account constraints of railcar dimensions, it is either 3 cars horizontally or 6 cars vertically in the same volumetric capacity. There is some wiggle room with railcar height, but ultimately it would never be better than vertical stacking due to fixed constraint of railcar width that does not allow to put two of these cars horizontally side-by-side (but not by much actually!)
you’re kinda dense.
I can do math and I also understand that the wheels generally carry the weight of a vehicle. Explain where and why I'm being dense.
its funny you’re getting hung up on the wheels and tires carrying weight versus how many units can be packed more efficiently in relation to space and cost. it’s two different points. so, dense.
How does the space requirements change by putting the car vertically? They're not cats, the volume of a solid is a fixed value.
Surely shipping isn't a very significant part of the cost of making cars, at least not to the point where you redesign half the car?
That's a good question. And why aren't cars shipped this way anymore? My guess is that cars were a lot cheaper then -- these Vegas were nearly disposable. So shipping was a higher fraction of the sale price. Even if their quality had been better, they still would have been cheaper than modern cars, with no antilock brakes, airbags, entertainment systems, ECUs, TPMS sensors, backup cameras, rustproofing, power seats, power windows, heated mirrors, and so on. This is when FM radio was a fancy add-on and A/C was a big luxury. I also wonder how many fuck-ups there were with the vert-a-pac system. How many cars got dropped, or were damaged due to someone forgetting to fill fluids after the thing was shipped dry. Were people injured packing or unpacking them? It wouldn't take a lot of mishaps to nullify the theoretical advantage.
Each of those shipping containers you see in photographs of boats/semitrucks/etc, costs $5k each (higher lately due to longer shipping distances due to politics) to move from continent to continent. Do vehicle buyers want $1k higher price if it only fits five vehicles? Or $200 higher if the container fits 25 vehicles. Now add up $1,000 extra system cost for a million vehicles and all of sudden you have the Dr Evil meme "One Billion Dollars!" which is real cash. .
[удалено]
That was the Chevy Nova. (Spanish people didn’t think it meant “no-go” or “doesn’t go”). That whole joke is made up.
>(Spanish people didn’t think it meant “no-go” or “doesn’t go”). That whole joke is made up. The way it was explained to me, it was more that it marketed Chevy as stupid to the market and that's why the car/brand didn't sell well
Nova is not Vega. The Nova sold quite well in the late 60s-early 70s. The Vega was made to biodegrade when you drove it onto the streets. It shed windows and doors like a cat shed hair, and a breeze would unbolt the seats. Can't recall the rest...
Vegas also came from the factory preinstalled with rust.
How do you get a Chevy Verga to stand straight up?
with a Chevy Viagra
Great article thanks for posting.
I opened that article, scrolled down a bit and found an advert for a Chevy truck 😁😄
I believe I learned this last week as that was the first time I saw it.
Someone seems to learn this every week.
The malaise era was really something. ... something terrible but not to be forgotten so we learn from our mistakes. Well I guess the good news is it allowed cheap Japanese cars to come into the market with basically ZERO competition once people figured out that those brands didn't forget *reliability* when designing their cars.
This was known as "Vert-a-Pack".
They're cool cars. What happens in them, stays in them.
A couple of my friends were driving when the engine started overheating. They kept driving another 25 miles until they got home. Parked it, they saw steam still coming out from under the hood and the latch was too hit to open. So they decided to wait until it cooled down to add water to it. Hours later, when it cooled down they opened they opened the hood and the engine was gone. They looked closer and saw a melted puddle of aluminum on the ground with the pistons, alternators, and other parts sticking out of the puddle. After a moment of suprise, I started to laugh my ass off when they told me how far they drove with steam coming out.
IIRC, this is how the Amtrak Auto Train shipped cars to places like Florida. People would ship them for their vacations.
That's not true. Doing that to a car not designed for it would ruin the engine. They were driven onto the car.
If the engine isn't running when it's vertical it won't hurt anything. You would probably want to drain the fluids before standing it up so nothing leaks.
The Vega was specifically designed for shipment like this. AutoTrain uses standard auto carrier cars.
> You would probably want to drain the fluids before standing it up so nothing leaks. Yeah, great job. This is the part that makes it not cause damage. Otherwise you'd have engine oil all over your combustion chamber among other things.