that PLL again

Probably better. Ralph Nader - in "Unsafe at Any Speed" - had to point out that they had twice the tendency to flip over of any other car before VW fixed the suspension.

The real flip-over risk was in a DAF. My mom had one. It could go reverse just as fast as forward. IOW, you could go backwards at freeway speed. The Dutch even held "reverse races" with them and one ever so slight wrong move at the steering wheel would send the car rolling over.

That was about the Corvair, not the beetle.

But we had plenty of jokes about hosing crushed beetles off the front grilles of big trucks, or getting them stuck in ones teeth.

Joe Gwinn

Found it. It's in the April 1993 HP Journal,

Cheers

Phil Hobbs

It was about the Corvair and the Beetle. The Corvair used a similar rear suspension and had the same problem.

Sure you did. European jokes about American cars concentrated on their huge size and sloppy suspensions.

And they still flipped over a *lot* less often than the Corvair which used the same swing axle but a much larger and heavier rear mounted engine.

All the media noise was about the Corvair, not the Beetle.

There was a sports handling package for the Corvair that solved the problem, and people asked why this wasn't standard, given the lethal consequences if the inside wheel tucked under the car.

The Beetle was never sold for its stellar handling, and there were few such accidents.

They were that for sure. But comfortable as one plowed across Texas at

Joe Gwinn

The Beetle had the same problem as did the Porches of the time. All had the problem and the resulting symptom. The Corvair won the prize though because of the marketing driven design that put a larger engine behind the rear axle to exacerbate the problem.

And long lived. I was given an LTD convertible with 200k miles and continued to run it for quite some time. A true boat.

In the US, where there were people who were silly enough to buy Corvairs.

Quite enough to be obvious in the statistics.

Less comfortable on the less straight bits of road in the less flat parts of the country.

Rear-engine, rear-drive cars (early Porsches, Corvairs, VWs) had serious power oversteer problems. Well, the original beetles didn't have enough power to make this critical. They would hold the road like glue, feel really great, until they broke loose without warning. Maybe a few seconds later they might roll.

Ernie Kovacs, a technical and comic genius of early TV, died when he spun his Corvair.

You should have tried a Beetle in Northern winter conditions.

On ice, a Beetle is about like a hammer thrown the handle first. I have spun a Beetle in a speed of about 20 mph on an icy road. I was at right angles to the road when the ice ended and around we went. It was a Beetle of 1951, in 1966.

Porsche owners didn't consider it a "problem". They used this to power their way around corners to win races. I've seen photos with three or more Porsches in the same turn, all of them angled to the path they are following. I bet those tires don't last very long.

I've met a number of autocross drivers who used Corvairs in the same way.

except for the special case of autocross and rally, if you go side ways you go slow

old 911s were basically machines for wrapping yuppies around trees. Porsche have since added much more advanced suspension and been inching the engine more and forward, but it will forever be rear engined the purist wouldn't want it any other way, in a 911. You can of course buy Porsche's with a more sensible configuration, but none of them quite as iconic as the 911

-Lasse

Yeah, it made them feel like Mario Andretti, right up until they died.

There's me thinking Mario Andretti was alive and kicking!

That's nonsense. Why would physics be any different in autocross and rally? The image I saw was a rather high speed race with what appeared to be banked turns. Rather different from rallies. I believe at that time the 911's dominated that particular type of racing.

I see the same sort of power turns in motorcycle racing on dirt tracks. Going into the turn they lay on the power and kick the rear out. The rear wheel breaks loose but that power is pushing them to the center of the turn and permits higher lateral G forces meaning faster cornering.

gravel/dirt makes a difference, or corners that a too tight i.e. rally

you don't see any racing on proper asfalt race tracks going side ways unless it is for show

-Lasse

You aren't reading what I'm writing. The Porsches were not on a dirt track. It was high speed banked turns. I did some searching but wasn't able to find the image. There are just too many promotional images out there and I couldn't find a way to narrow it down. I did find a few others of cars drifting around flat turns on asphalt. Mostly the images are just of cars sitting still, lol

fixed the suspension.

Rear-engine, rear-drive cars (early Porsches, Corvairs, VWs) had serious power oversteer problems. Well, the original beetles didn't have enough power to make this critical. They would hold the road like glue, feel really great, until they broke loose without warning. Maybe a few seconds later they might roll.

Ernie Kovacs, a technical and comic genius of early TV, died when he spun his Corvair.