How did Chevrolet spend years working on the Cosworth Vega, and end up with nothing more than a Vega the way it should have been in the first place, with a perkier and less rough but certainly not a high performance engine? And then price it at twice the price of a regular Vega? Or 50% more than a 1976 Camaro LT V8 went for. One of the great mysteries of the 1970s.
This will make our third Cosworth Vega post. The first was by me back in 2012, and not surprisingly, a GM Deadly Sin (#27), titled “Too Little, Too Late, Too Expensive”. The second was by Ed Stembridge, when he surprised us with a lavish and eloquent tribute to the development and history of the CV, as well as the story of one that he bought, and later sold. Of course, this happened in 2020, and Ed’s CV was pretty extensively modified to make significantly more power, which was of course the production CV’s Achilles heel. Well, that and an exorbitant price. I’m using some shots of Ed’s CV in this post.
So for #3, we go back to Road & Track’s test of a privately owned CV, as apparently Chevrolet was limiting access to them. Were they concerned that the press might be a bit let down after the years of hype and heightened expectations? Not unfounded fears, it turns out.
R&T starts off a bit less than positive, pointing out that the CV was several years late. And then pokes fun at Chevrolet’s PR comments about their new baby:
“One objective of the Cosworth Vega is to generate excitement and bolster interest in the GM domestic small car market. Aimed at the genuine enthusiast generally enamored of the present small imported sportsters, the Cosworth Vega is a practical demonstration of the Vega’s vitality, design depth and versatility. It is more than just an engine, it is a design concept built on existing Vega chassis and body design without any major change. In this car, the knowledgeable small sportster enthusiast will recognize and appreciate American design innovation and engineering imagination…”
Jeez; how utterly clueless. Sounds like a bad translation from another language. No wonder the CV was a flop and GM went tits up. “The small sportster enthusiast”? Who talks or writes like that, in 1976? Someone in Detroit completely out of touch with what’s been going on for quite a while.
Anyway, by the mid ’70s it wasn’t so much “small sportsters” but sports sedans like the BMW 2002 that should have been the CV’s target. But the 2002Tii had significantly more power (130 hp) than the CV’s 110 hp, without having to resort to exotic four-valve DOHC heads and all sorts of other high tech hardware. And in the end, that 110 hp was essentially the same as a base 2002 or 320i.
The good news was that the reduction in stroke resulting in 2.0 liters displacement took a fair amount of the 2.3 L Vega engine’s roughness away. But the bad news was summed up in this line: “For all its exotic features, however, the Cosworth Vega engine is not a high-performance unit.”
R&T points out that 55 hp/L is a quite modest output, and compared it to the rather similar Jensen-Healey engine, also a 2.0 L with high-tech four-valve DOHC head, but only with carbs instead of the CV’s fuel injection. Yet it made 140 hp, to the CV’s 110. What happened?
It really is one of the greater mysteries of the time, given how much time and resources GM threw at the CV. And ends up with a high-tech but quite middling engine.
And the results are painfully obvious in the stats: 0-60 in 12.3 seconds. Decidedly slower than a BMW 320i. 1/4 mile: 18.5 seconds @74 mph. Very modest.
And another unfortunate compromise: no air conditioning available. It’s 1976, and folks are getting used to having a/c in all kinds of cars, most of all from GM.
Yes, the CV handled well, but so did the regular Vegas. And not all was well even then: there was transient oversteer, which happened in part because the quite slow 22.5:1 ratio manual steering was simply too slow to respond fast enough in a succession of rapid maneuvers, like in the slalom test. A faster variable-ratio power steering would have solved that problem, but like the a/c, it was not available.
R&T was not able to generate skidpad speed and lateral acceleration numbers because the CV’s expensive engine started smoking ominously after only half a lap of the 100′ foot circle. Still a genuine Vega at heart, no matter how hard the Chevy engineers tried.
Here’s the rather painful summation: “with the Cosworth Vega engine the Vega now runs the way it should really have run all the time – easy, smooth, good response…” But expecting folks to pay more than double the price of a Vega to have a proper-running Vega was clearly not a viable proposition.
Now if it had had 150 hp, it might have been a different outcome.
Related:
Cosworth Vega: GM’s Deadly Sin #27 PN
CC: Cosworth Vega #2196 (Detailed History of the CV and Personal Ownership Experience) Ed Stembridge
“A day late and a dollar short” pretty well sums it up.
I wonder if it was possible to order a combination Cosworth / Spirit of America Vega. Anyone ever heard of one ?
Nope and nope.
I have to agree with Ed. I have seen two of these at my local wrecking yard back in the mid ’80s, gives you an idea of what people thought of them. And you have to feel sorry for those who coughed up the cash for these (or any Vega, for that matter). I should have bought one of the engines just to have as a display unit.
Car and Driver, I recall, got a far better 0-60 time in their test, under eight seconds.
I have seen exactly one of these, black as were all of the 1975s, but no other Vegas that year. 1976 models came in various colors so did not look as distinctive, so I may not have noticed, but I think there were only about half as many of them. 5000-plus engines were built and installed in only around 3500 cars…after the initial rush, nobody wanted them. The rest of the engines, after some were torn down for parts, were scrapped. A sad end.
Car and Driver got a much better 0-60 time out of quite a few cars, for a long time.
There were always rumors of how test cars were “hopped up” for the car magazine tests in general, and for C and D in particular, as they were the magazine peopled by respected “real” drivers who would get everything out of the car. They were proud of it, were good at keeping secrets, and weren’t much interested in crediting “tuned” cars instead of showing off their own untouchable awesome car testing skills and talents. Car testers and car manufacturers, each scratching the other’s back.
For GM, who had built up such a following for this car, particularly in places such as C and D magazine, it seems likely they would have provided a particularly “perky” example for them to test. Perhaps the same one that was passed around to some GM executives, to show off what the CV team had been up to. But likely not the one the CV buyer got at the showroom. R&T had to test one of those customer cars as well, instead of having one supplied for testing direct from GM, which is kind of a strange circumstance. It’s not like they were sold out and unavailable, or anything like that.
I’m extremely suspicious of that C/D review. It just screams “ringer”, given their long history of enabling DeLorean and his pet projects (even though he was gone by then).
There’s no way a genuine stock 110 hp CV would pull those kinds of numbers. Pre-production versions did, but they had significantly more power.
This might explain that:
“By mid-’72 this technological gem was spinning out 170 hp at 7600 rpm and 126 lb-ft at 4000 — heady stuff in a 2300-pound car — but part-throttle driveability was poor and emissions weren’t clean enough. By May 1973, output was down to 130 hp and 116 lb-ft, but Car and Driver took a prototype to 60 mph in 7.7 seconds with a 16.2-second 85-mph quarter mile, proclaiming, “The only four-passenger coupes faster than a Cosworth Vega have a Detroit V-8 under the hood.”
https://www.motortrend.com/cars/mercury/capri/1976/1976-chevrolet-cosworth-vega-vs-mercury-capri-ii/
The CV may have been targeted at the BMW 2002 buyer, but the slightly “look at me” look and the engine specs of the CV suggest that the target market was actually the Lotus Cortina buyer, the “small sportster enthusiast”.
The transient oversteer in the rear, along with the use of lots of rubber in the rear suspension, go back to the binding of the four-link rear suspension through its travel, as this set-up is a scaled down version of the Chevelle and B-O-P midsize cars. There had to be a lot of rubber in the bushings to make it work–and it still worked rather well.
A 12 second 0-60 and an 18 1/2 second quarter mile would get killed, back in the day, by a contemporary 240Z, V-6 Capri, or any Mazda rotary, right out of the box. For those of us teenagers who lived as much in the minutiae of the car magazine test data pages as the actual driving of the cars (I raise my hand), the CV was an also-ran on the day it actually turned up. And, as this CC entry and the prior CV postings indicate, the buildup for this car, in certain car guy circles, was huge, even though the car was vaporware for such a long time (we now have the word for such a thing, though we didn’t at the time).
but the slightly “look at me” look and the engine specs of the CV suggest that the target market was actually the Lotus Cortina buyer
Really? The Lotus Cortina was only sold in the US for one, maybe two years, and they probably sold a couple of dozen. Extremely rare, at best. And that was back in 1966; ten years earlier.
If that was their target, then they really were delusional.
Ah, but that is my point. I suspect this was a pet project inside GM, done for its own sake, without a real target market. Trying to pigeonhole just what they thought they were up to with the CV is really hard to do. Some cars are built to fill a perceived market niche (the Miata comes to mind), and others are built, just because they can be built. Looking at the specs of the CV, to me, suggests that some engineers at Chevrolet, smitten with the 4-valve, high-rev Lotus twin-cam engine, set off to do their version of such a thing. Finding a way to get it into production, they seized upon a promising little car with a subpar engine and no real performance variant, and they found a home for a pet engine project. This was just at the beginning of the rise of the various well-engineered production Japanese engines. At the time, at least when the project began, the Lotus twin cam (and The Cosworth name) were special and rather unique. Perhaps GM saw a potential better mainstream engine for the Vega, using twin cam technology. A precursor to the many Toyotas, Hondas, and Mazdas that widely used such production engines, years later. But it didn’t play out that way. Too exotic, not robust enough, not powerful enough, too complex and expensive to manufacture. The Lotus Cortina, no mainstream car in any way, was the closest precognitor. They didn’t set out to build a Lotus Cortina, but that is what they ended up up with, for lack of a reasonable alternative to point to.
It’s obvious what thy set out to do: build a 140-150 hp genuine sports sedan. To compete against the BMW, Alfa, Dastun Z, Mazda RX-2, and a bunch of other sports coupes/sports cars. A quite logical choice, and a not insignificant slice of the market. The problem is they failed.
Alfa had been building twin-cam engines since forever.
And no, a 16 valve twin cam engine was never going to be the main Vega engine.
hey didn’t set out to build a Lotus Cortina, but that is what they ended up up with, for lack of a reasonable alternative to point to.
Mo, they didn’t end up with a Lotus Cortina, because that was a brilliant car, and very much lived up to its potential and storied name. The CV didn’t.
Car and Driver tested a late production Cosworth Vega 5-speed and recorded a 17.4 second elapsed time in the quarter mile, which is consistent with a 0-60 time in the mid-to-low 10 second range. 1976 was a pretty low ebb for US market car performance. Still, it rankles that GM spent so much on this program that they couldn’t absorb the losses of selling the cars at prices that buyers would accept.
GM expended a great deal of prestige by promising so much and delivering so little. Period magazines aren’t just full of articles about the CV, they are also full of full page advertisements by Chevrolet promoting this disappointing and overpriced option package.
The Jensen-Healey wasn’t a huge success, but it was priced similarly to the Cosworth Vega while having a body that wasn’t shared with a million economy cars. Its Lotus 16 valve engine also delivered on the promise of high performance, even if it was no more reliable or durable. Why could Lotus meet emissions with a pair of Stromberg carburetors and still return performance numbers in testing that suggested they were telling the truth about coming within 4% of maintaining the dirty Dell’Orto carbureted Jensen-Healey’s power output? GM had the resources to include fuel injection, and they still couldn’t deliver a car that made sense in stock form.
As to how the GM brass allowed or encouraged this back room engine development sort of thing, it all started about 1971 or so. GM was just off of their nasty long strike in 1970, the small car thing was really starting to jell, and GM was still a RWD, truck axle, V8, full size car and truck manufacturer. They and their peers in Detroit were throwing big money at low-probability-of-success choices such as electric cars and rotary engines. There was a bit of corporate panic, especially with a Vega power plant that had obviously gone haywire, somewhere along the line. Perhaps the CV guys saw the opportunity as a way to sell high-tech and best-engineering-practice on a proven commodity, an in-line four cylinder engine. It just ended up stillborn and not the first evolution of the Vega power plant towards something reliable and powerful, because it was neither of those, in production form. It took the Japanese, and good fuel injection technology, for solid DOHC engine programs to be designed and widely installed.
But that is the thing, GM should have never bothered with developing the Vega engine from zero when its European divisions had engines which could be certified and used in a car like the Vega (Opel’s CIH and Vauxhall’s slant four). Both of the above got twin cam heads on or about the same time as the Vega with much better hp figures and were very reliable. Had they done that, I have no doubt the Vega would have been a big success.
Yet another machine that should have come with the Buick/Olds 215 aluminum V8 and that 5 speed. Even with a cat and a decent single exhaust, it would have been a well balanced ripper. And across the Pacific, Toyota was building 2.0L DOHC engines that could turn 7000 RPMs all day with anvil like reliability; yet there is nothing special in their construction(I know, I have a 70s 18R-G engine in my collection) Why couldn’t these clowns? Maybe they were jinxed; Cosworth was far better known for killer Ford engines
Actually they should have just put in a Chevy V8 with aluminum heads, and call it good. But they already had the Monza out by then, which offered a V8. And then there was the Camaro.
They should have just put all that money elsewhere, where it would have counted. Like a proper FI system for their V8s.
It still would have rusted away sitting in your driveway in Tucson.
I had a regular Vega and it had terminal cancer rust and burned a quart of oil every 75 miles, at 75,000 miles, in Dallas Tx, at four years of age.
Without addressing the terminal cancer rust and the variable-cylinder-diameter unlined aluminum engine, and doing so within the first year of production, the Vega was doomed as soon as they got to be 3 or 4 years old.
I can only imagine how fast these things melted back into the earth in places like New England.
That 110 HP net isn’t much better than the 140 HP gross from a four-carb ’65 Corvair Corsa, the 0-60 is about two seconds worse, the body rusts even faster than Corvairs did, AND it still oversteers? Such progress.
Two words: halo vehicle. That’s the only explanation I can think of for how the CV ultimately made production. IOW, it ‘looked’ good, but the actual performance (especially for the price) was lacking quite a bit.
Halo vehicle, yes – absolutely. Monza was also intended to be a halo vehicle off the H platform (“Italian Vega”). Had the CV shipped in 1973, with the engine making 150-170hp as configured at that time, it would have had the chops to back up the hype.
I wonder how much John Delorean’s departure from Chevrolet (then GM) had to do with the CV’s failure. IIRC, he was a big proponent of the project, then got promoted to the 14th floor. If he had remained at Chevy, maybe they could have gotten it to market by 1973.
That timing would have been perfect (or at least a lot better). By 1975, there was the baggage-free and better looking Monza and other division variants where you could get either a V6 or V8, and for a lot less than a CV. It was rather like the TC by Maserati debacle at Iacocca’s Chrysler, or maybe even the ’84-’86 Mustang SVO.
And there was also the whole Corvette Wankel engine project going on about the same time, too. Maybe there were engineers who could have gotten the CV engine to work properly sooner, but they were assigned to the still-born Wankel engine, instead.
Whatever the reasons, the CV was just never marketable, and died after a few short years of low production and sales.
I may be the only one here to have driven one, in 1978 or ‘79. Compared to my Alfetta it seemed similar performance and far faster and smoother than my own Vega GT. It was my friend’s SCCA Showroom Stock A race car and fairly competitive albeit a tad slower than the 280ZX, RX7 and TR8 (yes, all in the same class) that dominated here on the West Coast.
. It was my friend’s SCCA Showroom Stock A race car
Meaning it was blueprinted, balanced, and whatever else one could get away with. 🙂
Definitely true of a handful of National-level SS cars, but not my friend’s Cosworth Vega which was his daily driver before he decided to go through driver’s school and race it a few times at the Regional level. John was a very good driver and I think a few factors like gearing, good brakes, and tire size helped the Vega at Sears Point where most of our regional races were held in those days. Showroom Stock cars had to run OEM tire sizes and shaved BFG T/A’s in that BR70-13 size were actually stickier than the Euro brands favored by the “sports car” drivers.
I think “someone” at Chevrolet saw what Ford had done with “Lotus” cylinder heads bolted onto what was otherwise a turd of a four-popper Ford short-block. They remembered what Ford had done with the equivalent of a quarter-million dollars and Cosworth involvement–the most-winning Formula 1 engine series of all time (DFV); and what Cosworth was doing with lower-Formula four-poppers. At that time “Cosworth” was magic. Cosworth was a world-beater.
Chevy sends Vega blocks and a couple bales of money to Cosworth, tells them to make a “real” racing engine out of it; they really wanted the publicity of a Vega-based race motor with the Magic Word on the cam covers. Getting a “production” engine out of the deal was really just a ruse; a rationalization for the race motor. A successful race motor perhaps leads to a Cosworth-Vega-specific race formula, like the one for V-W engines.
So Cosworth goes to work; finds out the Vega block has serious deficiencies, and the Vega-based race-motor is a dead-end. “But wait…we can still stuff them into production cars, they’ll be de-tuned enough that they won’t break the block. They’ll be peppy and unique, and they still have the Magic Word on the cam covers!”
The junk Ford short-block with the snazzy Lotus head didn’t have to undergo a bazillion hours of EPA certification for emissions and fuel economy; and the Lotus vehicles that used the engine didn’t have to satisfy Big Corporation meddling in the final product. Even the original Lotus-Cortinas had Chapman-specified suspension; it wasn’t until later that cost-cutting removed all the fun bits.
The Vega got less from GM than the Cortina got from Ford. There never was a “true” Lotus-like HP sports car with the C-V engine, to provide some halo effect; the base Vega was a well-known pile of crap at that time.
The rest is history.
My older brother has worshipped GM all of this life. I recall the hype and how he told me the Cosworth Vega was going to be the greatest thing ever made.
The hype went on for what seemed years. That’s because it was years and the final product was a complete dud. I mean, 110 hp from a Cosworth designed head, with fuel injection?
GM must have chalked up quite a loss on this turkey. I wonder what the Vega would have been like with a decent motor?
You can still find these stashed away in garages, still waiting for that bubble, just like those last convertible Caddys from 1976. They’re usually in good shape and are an affordable nostalgia cruiser.
I forget if this is correct or not, but wasn’t the idea to use this Cosworth engine in race spec first, and then adapt it to the road specification Vega? Regardless, the final product was doomed from moving goalposts. GM had crude running prototypes of the twin cam as early as mid 1971. 1973 is when GM had what they thought would be production-spec cars finalized for 1974 EPA emissions, but alas, the test cars all failed the 40,000 mile endurance test trials miserabley in regards to hydrocarbon emissions. The twin cam had to be reworked thoroughly to finally be approved in March 1975, at the expense of the projected 140 hp target (production motors made 110 hp). It is interesting to note that the original 1971 prototypes, using dual carbs, were producing 170 hp before emission standards came into play.
Truly a shame.
The original 1971 Vega was fun to drive, at least it was with a 4-speed, but so many issues made it such a Deadly Sin. Maybe GM thought, in a world where the Corvette only had 165hp, 110 wasn’t so bad.
The price more than anything else killed it. Being 80% of that BMW, If they could’ve gotten it out for 10% more than a standard Vega it would’ve offered value for money, particularly with Datsun having abandoned the 510’s niche with the fatter 610 and decontented 710.
Back in 1974, either in the January or February issue of Car & Driver did a road test of a 1974 pre-production Cosworth Vega. The engine’s output at the time was 140 hp, and it did some rather impressive performance figures if I remember right. In retrospect, this vehicle screamed “ringer”. If I remember correctly, this version failed its EPA test (burned valves or something like that) so it was back to the drawing board and when a street legal version finally debuted it was putting out all of 110 hp.
Who but GM could manage to wring such mediocrity from such promising ingredients while spending a tom of money. It was a harbinger of what was to come…
I never quite realized they cost **that** much more than a regular Vega. Goodness!
FWIW, here are some recent eBay sales—even lower $$$$$ than I would have guessed:
Exactly the point that I made, and it would be an attention getter at the car show or cruise night. Just think of it as what the Vega should have been and enjoy it
I was a Chevrolet tech for many years and I bought a 76 CV after my 69 Camaro SS convertible was stolen. I bought brand new as a leftover in 77 for $4800.. I have owned it all these years and just recently sold it to my friend who bugged me for years to buy it. Chevrolet made 3,507 units over 2 years and I had #2416.. Just so you all know, the car not quick off the line but pulled extremely well at 3500 rpms and up and would actually put you back in the seat. I remember 1 night my friend and I were cruising around and stumbled upon a 302 Mustang, 4 spd and headers. I ran him light to light and beat him by over 2 car lengths. When we stopped at the next light, he was shocked and he asked me if I had a V8 in it. I owned that car for 38 years, put over 100,000 miles on it and never had any engine work done, or rust on the car to this day. The engine was hand built at the factory and Chevrolet actually had the valve cover hand signed by the person who built it. The engine had a lot of tech in it for the time. The engine had 4 valves per cylinder, was balanced and blue printed, had a forged crankshaft, shot peened rods, fuel injected, factory headers, 4.10 posi rear and a 5 speed transmission. It was fun to drive and also handled extremely well. It may not have been the fastest car out there, but was FAR quicker that it was rated for.
Over at the Ford garage where I wrenched, Vega’s reputation was selling a lot of Pintos by 1975. Advance reports of the CV had us wondering what Ford would offer. Nothing. It turned out to be the appropriate response to the CV.
I remember reading this review in middle school. With what I know now, I wonder how a Vega powered by 2.3 liter version the Vauxhall slant 4 would have worked out. Heck, how would a Federalized Vauxhall Viva/Firenza have worked? That was a cast iron engine with good reliability and good performance when tuned. It even had a “Cosworth” option in the form of the Lotus engine with a dohc 16 valve head as used in the Jensen Healey and various Loti.
I would also like to see a restomod Vega with a modern GM Ecotec 4, a 5 speed manual and tuned suspension.
Unfortunately GM’s small cars of the 70s were very a General Burnside period as the Vega, Monza, Chevette and Citation snatched defeat from the jaws of victory.
The Lotus head Vauxhall engine was a scam run on the FIA to try and beat the Escorts in rallying; none of the production versions had the Lotus head, and it got them kicked out of WRC during inspection 1978 Portugal. You had to buy the Lotus design head thru the parts department and replace the factory one, and they say only about 100 or so were made available to the public.
The one damning thing I read about the Cosworth engine was that the oil return from the head was not up to the job at racing RPMs, and the car could run its bearings while the head was drowning in oil.
I liked the Vegas’ looks well enough, especially the wagons. I was working with a guy whose sideline was putting Chevy V8s into any Vega he could get his hands on. Unfortunately, the only one of his I drove had the biggest one – I’m not up on ’70s Chevy V8s, but it was a brute. It was also a 4-speed, with a return spring on the clutch made for a short guy with muscular legs, which he was and I wasn’t, and I was running our lunches in noontime Nashville traffic. I did not have to be helped out of the car, but it was awful close to that.