What if?

[Fabrux]

I am a big alternate history buff and have stumbled upon a message board dedicated to alternate historical events and the stories that result from them. I thought it might be an interesting exercise to apply an alternate event to the automotive world:

What if General Motors had purchased American Motors instead of Chrysler?

[johnbuzzed]

I dunno. Maybe one could buy a Jeep at a Chevy or GM dealer?

[Deathgoblin]

What if Packard had survived?

[chepp]

What if Tucker had become a viable manufacturer and thus cause the others to "catch up" to its innovations? Was the central "bullet" on the fronts of the late '40s Studebaker and Ford cars a coincidence or were they fillers for a central headlight that steered with the front wheels like the Tucker?

[2000-cvpi]

What if Tucker had become a viable manufacturer and thus cause the others to "catch up" to its innovations? Was the central "bullet" on the fronts of the late '40s Studebaker and Ford cars a coincidence or were they fillers for a central headlight that steered with the front wheels like the Tucker?

That would be a fun thing to think about.

[Evilbenny]

What kind of muscle cars would we have today if the government/EPA would get out of the way?

[johnbuzzed]

What if the Corvette were made from steel instead of fiberglass?

[kalbert]

What kind of muscle cars would we have today if the government/EPA would get out of the way?

Ha ha ha ha! Seriously? You do know that the muscle car boom of the late 1960's was halted to protect the financial interests of insurance providers more so than the environment right? A better question might be "What kind of muscle cars would we have today if people had personal accountability and common sense enough to not behave in ways that would require government intervention to protect those that are capable of making responsible choices". Even if protecting the environment was the primary cause for the demise of the "muscle car", what kind health and longevity would the inhabitants of this planet have to look forward to if the government/EPA would get out of the way? Not to mention that the push toward more efficient energy utilization has birthed the multiple horsepower per cubic inch "muscle cars" we have today that get 20mpg doing it?

[kalbert]

What if the Corvette were made from steel instead of fiberglass?

Interesting question there... Would they have all rotted away and have been scrapped out, or would the ease of repair for the steel vs glass have birthed an entire Goodmark facility just for stamping out Vette parts!

[johnbuzzed]

Alternate history = rusty 'Vette diorama!

[Richard Bartrop]

What if the Corvette were made from steel instead of fiberglass?

That would have meant less money to put into things like independent rear suspension, and higher sales would have been needed to make it profitable, so Corvettes would have probably ended with a solid rear axle Stingray some time in the 1960's.

[JM485]

What kind of muscle cars would we have today if the government/EPA would get out of the way?

Awesome ones, and we would all be having way too much fun in them to have time to build model cars!

[Harry P.]

That would have meant less money to put into things like independent rear suspension, and higher sales would have been needed to make it profitable, so Corvettes would have probably ended with a solid rear axle Stingray some time in the 1960's.

I'm curious to hear your reasoning. Fiberglass needs tooling, just like sheetmetal does. How do you see large amounts of money being saved by using a fiberglass body instead of a sheetmetal body?

[Tom Geiger]

What if the Corvette were made from steel instead of fiberglass?

Alternate history = rusty 'Vette diorama!

My point exactly!

[Richard Bartrop]

I'm curious to hear your reasoning. Fiberglass needs tooling, just like sheetmetal does. How do you see large amounts of money being saved by using a fiberglass body instead of a sheetmetal body?

Simple, pressed steel involves pressing, so large presses, and dies that are able to withstand the pressure. In any case, whenever I've read a history of Corvettes, the rationale for going with fiberglass has always been that the tooling was less expensive, so I assumed they knew what they were talking about.

1961 SAE paper on Corvette construction that might be of interest.

http://corvetteactioncenter.com/specs/c1/1961/61sae.html#.Ui5f-D9OIuQ

Edited September 10, 2013 by Richard Bartrop

[mistermodel]

what if the government didn't bail out gm?would nascar be racing hendrick Hondas?

[zenrat]

What if the US drove on the correct side of the road?

More Australian, British & Japanese cars on your roads and more US cars on ours.

[JunkPile]

What if Kitty Wells would have married Conway Twitty......Kitty Twitty

[LDO]

What if Ella Fitzgerald married Darth Vader?

What if the US had known in advance about the attack on Pearl Harbor? The Navy could have sent up fighters to intercept the Japanese planes, then a task force to destroy the Japanese fleet. With her Navy crippled, defeat would have taken much less time, allowing more resources to go to Europe, ending that war sooner. In addition to all the lives saved, what would the world be like if jet aircraft were thought of as unnecessary/pipe dreams in 1942? What if large portions of Europe didn't need to be rebuilt/occupied? Would the US be the world power that it is now? So much of the economy was driven by the war, then the boom afterward...even cheap cargo planes and ships bought as surplus after the war. I wondered about all those things and more after watching a program about a spy during the war who pieced together that Japan was planning an attack. He tried to warn J. Edgar Hoover, who dismissed him because he basically didn't like the messenger. Is it true??? I don't know. There's a lot of baloney on tv these days.

[Harry P.]

Simple, pressed steel involves pressing, so large presses, and dies that are able to withstand the pressure. In any case, whenever I've read a history of Corvettes, the rationale for going with fiberglass has always been that the tooling was less expensive, so I assumed they knew what they were talking about.

1961 SAE paper on Corvette construction that might be of interest.

http://corvetteactioncenter.com/specs/c1/1961/61sae.html#.Ui5f-D9OIuQ

I always thought that the rather involved process of making body panels of fiberglass was more expensive than using steel stampings, not cheaper. And in fact a line from the very story you linked to seems to bear that out:

..."a full-scale investigation proved the cost penalty (of using fiberglass instead of stamped steel) to be slight."

Which to me says that there was a "cost penalty" to using fiberglass, albeit a small one.

What I have always heard is that GM wanted to put the Corvette into production ASAP, so they went with fiberglass because it would be faster than tooling up new dies for a sheet-metal body. Faster... not necessarily cheaper.

,

[Harry P.]

What if Ella Fitzgerald married Darth Vader?

What if Ella Fitzgerald had married Allan Funt?

[Longbox55]

Both points are true. Getting the 'Vette into production faster was easier using fiberglass, but there was also a cost savings of not having to produce stamping dies for what would be a low production vehicle. There's also the case that some of the body lines of the Corvette would be much easier to produce using fiberglass over steel.

Ona side tangent, and going along with the alternate history theme of the thread, GM did experiment with an aluminum body for the Corvette, as well as a 4 seat varsion of the '63 Stingray body, which was considered to better compete with the Thunderbird.

[Richard Bartrop]

I always thought that the rather involved process of making body panels of fiberglass was more expensive than using steel stampings, not cheaper. And in fact a line from the very story you linked to seems to bear that out:

..."a full-scale investigation proved the cost penalty (of using fiberglass instead of stamped steel) to be slight."

Which to me says that there was a "cost penalty" to using fiberglass, albeit a small one.

What I have always heard is that GM wanted to put the Corvette into production ASAP, so they went with fiberglass because it would be faster than tooling up new dies for a sheet-metal body. Faster... not necessarily cheaper.

,

Basically, it works out that making each one is indeed more expensive, but the setup costs are a lot cheaper, which is why it's attractive for making a relatively small number of cars. If you're going to make a lot of cars, then pressing metal is the way to go, but the down side is that you have to make a lot of them to justify the cost of all those presses. It's like the difference between injection moulded kits, and resin.

[Harry P.]

There were several different versions of the Corvette early on that never made production but were in the Motorama shows. Pretty nice versions, actually.

[cobraman]

We have another "new" Harry !