First Car, Lasting Memory

Bonnie Collins
    
“It was Chevy’s answer to the Volkswagen Beetle,” Bonnie says of the Chevrolet Corvair she inherited from her older brothers and sisters during high school in Fayetteville, North Carolina.
    
The car, which Bonnie likes to boast won Motor Trend’s Car of the Year years before she started driving it, wasn’t without its problems. When the car stalled, passengers had to push it so she could pop the clutch and keep going. And she had to keep a couple gallons of crude oil in the backseat because of a small oil leak in the engine.
    
“I probably should’ve died from carbon monoxide poisoning,” she figures, remembering that she knew it was time to add more oil when it seeped into the fan-cooled engine, infiltrating the car. “I remember thinking, ‘It sure smells a lot like oil in here!’”
    
But the car was hip, with a maroon exterior—she preferred to call it “Cabernet”—and white leather interior. Bonnie, now in her fifties and working in real estate, liked to impress guys with her knowledge of the bucket-seated car that takes its name from the Chevrolet Corvette and Belair.
    
“Guys would come up to the car and rave about its dual-carbs, and I would say, ‘Dual-carbs, yeah! Those are awesome!’ and suddenly I was a hit!” she laughs.
    
And when a freak snowstorm hit North Carolina during midterm exams, her dream came true. After taking her only exam, she took back-roads to avoid the icy main passages. But as she approached a steep hill, her car lost control.
    
“It became like a sled, and here I was, just sliding down the hill,” she says.
    
The car skidded to a stop just in front of the house of her longtime crush.
    
“So he invited me in, and we drank hot chocolate, and we just waited for them to clear the roads so my Dad could come get me,” she remembers. “And then, we had to come back to get the car, so it was a second chance to see him.”
    
Ralph Nader’s release of the book Unsafe at Any Speed, examining the dangers of the Corvair, which killed comedian Ernie Kovac years earlier, might have contributed to her decision to discard the Cabernet beauty.
    
But she didn’t stray far—she ended up with its close cousin and closer enemy, the Volkswagen Beetle.