How General Motors will get your new car to you.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=jTtcPxSag50
Whatever happened to shipping Cadillacs in containers?
Verticle shipping of Vegas apparently was as a successful as the Chevy Vega itself. Shipping lemons this way did not make lemonade out of the concept of vericle stacking automobiles.
No, those lemons just stayed lemons. Any Vega that you see at classic car shows these days usually show up as wheelbarrows full of rust.
Victrola1How General Motors will get your new car to you.
Watch him run that Eldo up the ramp! Not sure the inspection will catch the shock and bushing damage!
And why am I nervous watching trilevels going over the hump?
I can think of some issues, one of which was the overhead height and another the enormously high center of mass in that era of harmonic rock. But one highly interesting one would be the way they got the Caddys into containers only inches wider than the doors -- see the specialized pushers and ramps? Now this was the era of marshmallow roll compliance on full-size cars, and you will note that the rear of each car was remarkably close to the open end of its container ... with no practical way to engage either the parking pawl or the parking brake once the car was loaded in. This probably explains at least some of the v-e-e-e-e-e-r-y delicate and slow handling of the containers both via overhead lift and piggy-packer equipment... once you started to tip one of those babies toward the open end things might snowball remarkably quickly and expensively...
Vertical shipping of Vegas apparently was as a successful as the Chevy Vega itself.
What I heard was that only a few (admittedly predictable) things needed redesign to make the approach work well. There was some detail design work so that fluids in the cars didn't leak in transit position; I believe one of the reasons for the development of those ghastly Delco Freedom batteries was to get a battery construction that could be reliably upended. The real problem with Vert-A-Pacs was that the capital equipment was useful only for the cars it was designed for, and when those stopped selling well, GM was left with very limited alternatives for what were likely expensive purpose-built cars; I do not recall any discussion let alone use of vertical stacking when the X-body cars came along a bit later.
Shipping lemons this way did not make lemonade out of the concept of vertical stacking automobiles.
The idea was fine ... for automobiles that fit within the '70s loading gage when vertically stacked and trains that ran on reasonable track. Both those things became increasingly unlikely as time progressed.
Vegas weren't necessarily lemons -- the Cosworth Vega with proper wheels was a fine little car. The problem was more with building a fairly well-engineered design as a cheap car to lowest price, with typical early-Seventies build quality. And that produced lemons elsewhere at GM as well as with the Vegas.
Twenty-three GM plants in Michigan...
And all those neckties...
Larry Resident Microferroequinologist (at least at my house) Everyone goes home; Safety begins with you My Opinion. Standard Disclaimers Apply. No Expiration Date Come ride the rails with me! There's one thing about humility - the moment you think you've got it, you've lost it...
Wanna know where your car is in transit? Change that big reel to reel tape on the computer and you will know where it was within the last 24 hours.
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