The Corvair Was A Platform Strategy
My friend Steve Maylish first referred me to an article (Marion) about the Chevrolet Corvair and platform strategy. I have to admit that early on, I was giving him a hard time because the Corvair, as we all know, has a storied past, what with Ralph Nadar and all. If you give the message a little time, it grows on you, however.
The Corvair was conceived in about 1955 as a Volkswagen killer. The Big Three in America realized that the foreign imports were doing something they hadn't even considered: selling small cars. General Motors decided to do something. The result was the Corvair. If you look a little more closely, you will notice that the Corvair isn't one car, but at least three or four depending on your definition of a car. There was a four door. There was a two door. There was a two door convertible. There was a van. There was a pick-up of sorts. Then, for most of the models, there was a souped-up version that was a lot of fun to drive. All new. All based on a new platform (when had we ever seen a rear engine car in America before, at least since the very, very short-lived Tucker?) with many shared parts across all the models. Now you have to squint a bit, but you will realize that the Camaro replaced parts of the offering, as did the Chevrolet Van. They were part of the platform, too.
Early on, the Corvair was disruptive in the industry. It was different, certainly. Cheaper, probably. It's smallness forced them to leave off some of the fins and chrome American autos were famous for at the time. It allowed General Motors to enter the compact market with a new design conceived from a blank piece of paper.
The platform part of the strategy allowed GM to use the engines and suspension parts across the whole product line, saving money and design time. Looked at another way, because they were focusing on fewer parts, they were able to invest more in each part.
Reference
Simpson, Timoth W., Zahed Siddique, and Jianxin Jiao, editors. Product Platform and Product Family Design. Springer Science+Business Media, Inc. 2006.
Marion, Tucker J. and Timothy W. Simpson. Platform Leveraging Strategies and Market Segmentation. In Simpson. 73.