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1965-67 U.S. Corvair Regular Production Option (RPO) StatisticsSource material provided courtesy of Dave Newell This article was published in the March, 2005 CORSA Communique. IntroductionJudging by topics on the Virtual Vairs email discussion list and conversations at CORSA events over the years, owners of 1965-67 Corvairs often wonder how rare a given option on their cars is. Chevrolet published (internally) year-end totals of factory-installed options. Some factory-installed options could also be dealer-installed as accessories, and no record was kept of those installations, or for dealer-installed accessories of any kind. Factory-installed options fall into two categories:
Almost all Corvair factory-installed options for 1965-67 are RPOs. The 140 HP engine for 1967 was a COPO. Dave Newell, Historian for the Corvair Preservation Foundation, obtained copies of the year-end U.S. RPO reports and dug in the Chevrolet records for the Tonawanda engine plant production totals in 1967. CORSA members are the lucky beneficiaries of his eagle eye for copying irreplaceable information! Note that the actual number of 1967 cars sold with the 140 HP engine may be a small amount less than the number Dave retrieved from the engine production report, since it was common practice to make a few extras for replacement or engineering purposes. Information from the equivalent reports for “cousins” of the Corvair is also available:
Dave previously provided the equivalent information for 1966 Canadian Corvair production, which was featured in the June, 2000 CORSA Communique and is described elsewhere on my site. Corvairs were not produced in Canada after 1966. The three original reports list the quantity of each RPO produced and the percentage of cars on which it was installed, rounded to the nearest whole number. This information is of enormous value on its own but is further enhanced by:
The result of that work is shown in Table 1. Note that, like the original Chevrolet reports, the RPOs for 1965 Greenbriers are not included. Corvair forward control vehicles used a completely different set of RPOs than Corvair cars. Table 2 gives the yearly production totals for each model year, along with a by-model breakdown. To minimize confusion, Table 1 uses the total yearly Corvair production figures to calculate all of the percentages, even when a RPO was available only on a subset of the total production. (Website exclusive: an addendum which explores the production subset question.) The original RPO reports also contain production numbers for sedans built with two-tone paint, RPO 950. This information is listed at the end of the Body section of Table 1. Dave Newell explained: "Apparently RPO 950 was used after 1964 to account for total two-tone paint production. Prior to 1965 (when Chevy went to letter codes for paint) each two-tone combination had its own code in the 950 range. RPO 950 was last used on Corvairs to indicate a single combination in 1963 when it indicated Ermine White over Tuxedo Black." Interestingly, in Canada, the molding on the "C" pillar that accompanied the two-tone paint was assigned a RPO (D99), which indicates that, at least theoretically, the molding could have been ordered without the two-tone paint from the Oshawa plant. What the original RPO reports do not provide is any data on combinations of options installed beyond the “Z” option groups, as documented in the Special Items section of Table 1. The only way to get that information would be to calculate all of the combinations from the factory records for each car. Unfortunately, these production records are not available. (Canadian Corvair owners can obtain this info from GM Canada’s Vintage Vehicle Services.) However, Dave Newell located some very interesting combinatorial info from a different source, namely the year-end powertrain production reports for 1965 and 1966. They list how many of each engine type were equipped with PowerGlide automatic transmissions. That info is presented in Table 3. This report does not break down the 3- or 4-speed transmission combinations similarly. The reason given in the report is that the manual transmissions were the same across all engine types; meaning that the engine production part numbers were the same regardless of whether the transmission was 3- or 4-speed. A review of engine block code suffixes confirms this. Table 1: 1965-1967 Corvair Regular Production Option Statistics, grouped by Uniform Parts Classification (UPC)
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