Скачать или смотреть The Weirdest Thing About the Chevy Vega Was How GM Shipped It

Why did General Motors spend two hundred million dollars engineering a car to ride standing on its nose across the country — and then forget to give it a big enough radiator? The Chevy Vega is one of the strangest stories in American automotive history, not because it failed, but because of where the engineering genius went and where it didn't. GM and the Southern Pacific Railroad built four hundred and ten custom Vert-A-Pac railcars that shipped Vegas vertically, nose-down, thirty per car instead of eighteen, slashing transport costs by forty percent. To make it work, engineers redesigned the battery, the carburetor float bowl, the oil system, and even the windshield washer bottle so nothing would leak during a week-long train ride from Lordstown, Ohio to the California coast. They built the most automated factory in the world, ran robots that welded ninety percent of the body, and pushed one car off the line every thirty-six seconds. Then the engine overheated, the head gaskets failed, the fenders rusted through in a single winter, and six out of every seven Vegas built ended up recalled. This is the story of a two-hundred-million-dollar bet on the wrong priorities — where the shipping was flawless and the car was disposable — told through the engineers who built it, the workers who struck over it, and the technology that outlived it by decades in Porsche and Mercedes engines but couldn't survive its first winter in a Chevy.

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