There are plenty of automotive wear items that are expensive to replace. As far as engine air filters are concerned, though, they’re usually pretty easy to change, and cheap to boot. But what if they were more expensive and annoying to deal with? If anyone could pull that off, it would have to be the Germans, right? Only, this time, it was GM!
This historical misstep comes to us from Rare Classic Cars and Automotive History, a YouTube channel that chronicles interesting car tales from long ago. The channel has recently been diving into some of the more questionable air cleaner designs out there.
As it turns out, one of the most egregious examples comes from a GM product that bathes in infamy. I speak, of course, of the accursed Chevy Vega.
If It Ain’t Broke, Definitely “Fix” It
The Vega was an important car for GM. The company needed a subcompact vehicle to grab sales in what was fast becoming a critical and competitive segment. Development began in earnest in the late 1960s, with the car entering production in 1970 for the 1971 model year. Ahead of launch, GM Vice President John DeLorean talked a big game and promised a car with exceptional handling, exceptional acceleration, and exceptional quality.
As we’ve previously discussed, the Chevy Vega was pretty much none of those things. Rust issues, assembly issues, and all manner of other foibles quickly came to the fore when the model hit the open market. DeLorean would later admit that his boosterism was misguided in his book, On A Clear Day You Can See General Motors. “While I was convinced that we were doing our best with the car that was given to us, I was called upon by the corporation to tout the car far beyond my personal convictions about it.”
There’s one flaw to the Vega, though, that is seldom discussed— mostly because it was overshadowed by all the other problems. It’s the air cleaner. GM found a way to make a commodity part more expensive and annoying for the customer. How? By integrating the filter and its housing into one overly complicated assembly.
Back in the 1970s, the vast majority of cars used the same simple design. On top of the carburetor would sit a round two-piece air cleaner housing. You’d undo a wing nut, take the lid off the housing, and inside would sit a round paper air filter. You’d pull it out, put in a new one, reinstall the lid, and you were done. There were only a few sizes of these round filters, and just about every auto shop had filters to suit most every car on the road.
For some reason, GM didn’t want to go this route on the Vega. Instead, it decided to put the paper filter inside an unopenable metal housing. The housing was still made in two pieces, and was pretty similar to a regular air cleaner design, but the top and bottom were permanently crimped together to enclose the air filter element inside. This assembly then bolted onto the carburetor directly.
Thus, when you wanted to change your filter, you weren’t just throwing away and replacing a cheap paper filter. You had to buy the whole metal air cleaner assembly and change it out as a unit. This made sourcing a filter far more painful. Instead of grabbing any old round filter of the correct size off the shelf, you had to get the specific AC brand part for the Vega. AC would become AC-Delco in 1974, streamlined to ACDelco in 1995.
This was an unpopular decision and a confusing one from an engineering standpoint. Enterprising owners and mechanics did find a workaround, however. The popular move was to pry or cut open the sealed filter housing to turn it back into a two-piece unit. Then, it could be used like a regular air cleaner housing, with the paper filter inside changed like any other. However, there are some reports that the original paper element was glued inside the housing and removing it required scraping off some residue afterward.
The aftermarket also offered a nice alternative. Companies like Fram sold their own two-piece air cleaner housings that could be installed in place of the original. Once installed, further filter changes could be handled in the usual manner.
The service manual for the Vega stated the air cleaner should be changed every 50,000 miles, or every 24 months—whichever came first. More regular replacement was recommended for heavy-duty use or dusty conditions. It was a strangely long service interval for the era, which took some of the sting out of the price—it meant dealing with the problem was a regular but infrequent headache for owners. One YouTube commenter notes that sticker shock was common back then. In the 1970s, when a regular air filter might cost $5 at most, the Vega’s air cleaner assembly could cost three to four times as much. In an era that was economically quite turbulent, this was surely an unwelcome additional expense for some owners.
Why did GM do it? The most likely theory was that it had to do with the grand cost-cutting effort that defined the vehicle’s production. GM was chasing wild savings in the Vega program. It even famously figured out how to ship the cars vertically to fit more vehicles into a single train carriage to save on transport costs. In the case of the air cleaner, the all-in-one design would have simplified assembly, speeding the production line to some greater or lesser degree. Normally, the operation would take four stages—install the air cleaner base, then a filter, then the lid, and finally a wingnut. Having a single-part air cleaner with an integrated filter would reduce this to two operations—put the cleaner on, and tighten the nut.
In any case, the Vega’s design thankfully didn’t become a widespread trend in modern automobiles. Most cars on the market will let you change an engine air filter element directly and with a minimum of fuss. In this very specific way, pertinent to air filters only, we’re very lucky to be living in an era as blessed as this one.
Image credits: GM, eBay,
Lewin, GM isn’t the only manufacturer guilty of this. Check out the 2007 Ford Focus. This model came with a “Lifetime” air filter that, of course, needed to be replaced at some point. They used to cost $400 from Ford,and you had to remove the inner fender to replace it.
Sounds similar to the article about Dorman building a better oil filter housing for the Pentastar. Everything old is new again.
Interesting. I’m pretty sure that’s longer than any of my modern cars. I wonder how this compared to other filter replacement intervals of the time. If it cost 3-4 times as much but lasted 3-4 times as long then technically it wasn’t so bad (although it still seems incredibly wasteful).
Geesh, most of them probably only needed to replace it once or maybe twice in the lifetime of the car. Plenty of other things to complain about.
It’s practically a timing belt! DT needs to weigh in.
If they last 50k miles, they’d be a good fit for for an RX8. That’s the lifetime of that rotary engine.
I’m impressed GM kept the wing nut and didn’t change it over to something requiring a 37-point star specialty Torx socket.
Chevrolet Pissed Everyone Off When It Put These Dumb Air Filters On the Vega -> Chevrolet Pissed Everyone Off When It Made the Vega
Maybe today they are a rare car, but back in the 70’s they were everywhere. I’m surprised that manufacturer’s didn’t go universal size across the board on all replaceable components such as filters. It’d cut the supply chain. Use the small air filter element on a 4 cylinder, on larger engines, use maybe two of the same one stacked, etc.
The first time I attended a Saab meet I was surprised to see that the local dealership (this was a while ago) had donated a case of identical oil filters that were being awarded individually as raffle prizes. After all, what if the filter was for a different model than the winner had? That’s when someone explained to me that every model for the company’s entire history uses the same oil filter, assuming it has an oil filter in the first place.
At the time I had both a two-stroke and a V4 car, so at least it worked for the latter.
Oh how wrong you are. Not about air filters, but the unitization of components to reduce costs is on a scale today those old GM bean counters could not even dream of. Not everything is necessarily bad or even worse because of that, but these days hardly anything is not a “one piece sealed filter unit”.
The issue here is not that GM broke a few rules, or took a few liberties with cost cutting on the Vega. They did.
But you can’t hold an entire company responsible for the actions of a few sick, perverted individuals. For if you do, then shouldn’t we blame the whole automotive industry? And if the whole automotive industry is to blame, then is this not an indictment of our transportation system in general? I put it to you, Lewin. Isn’t this an indictment of our entire American society? Well, you can do what you want, but I will not stand by and listen to you bad mouth the Chevrolet Vega! Gentlemen!
Thanks Otter
My first thought was to point out that Ford did this kind of silly thing comparatively recently, but in a google search I noticed that there was another automotive website that’s pointed this out just two days ago.
I liken this to sealed differentials, transmissions, and/or final drives (lifetime**)
**lifetime defined as any random large number, but never large enough to escape the vehicle’s actual useful life.
In high school, my buddy’s dad had one that I helped work on. What a hard car to work on for loads of reasons, mostly it being a crap pile.
Don’t forget that the Chevette had the same system! GM really wanted to get a few extra bucks out of their “cheapskate” buyers back in the day.
Came here looking for this. I still remember The Old Man having a complete shit fit when he discovered this on his ’84 Shove-it.
Maybe they though the car would rust to death before the air filter needed to be replaced anyway 😛
This is the correct answer. Similar to Ford’s “cheaper to let them sue us than to conduct a proper recall”.
That wasn’t technically correct, if you’re referring to the Pinto memo, no recall was required because no defect was technically present, and they weren’t talking about cost of litigation, they were talking about total cost to the US auto industry of several different proposed rear impact fuel system standards the NHTSA was evaluating weighed against likely benefit in lives saved of each proposal, using the dollar value per life that the NHTSA calculated themselves for their own regulatory purposes
Same thing in my book. Rich guy weighs the cost of screwing people over vs the cost of being a straight arrow. Usually, the first option wins.
That’s not entirely accurate, at the time the Pinto was in development, there was no federal standard for fuel system integrity in rear impacts, it had been considered, but left out of the first set of Federal Motor Vehicle Safety Standards in 1968, however, everyone expected NHTSA would revisit the issue before too long, though there was speculation as to which form it would take.
In 1969, when the Pinto was already nearly two years into development, NHTSA proposed a 20mph moving barrier rear impact standard, which Ford endorsed and publicly stated that all their cars would meet that standard by 1973, even if NHTSA ultimately decided not to implement it, and the Pinto was therefore engineered to meet that rear impact specification
However, in August of 1970, which was just as the Pinto was going into series production for the 1971 model year debut, NHTSA revealed the final version of the rear impact standard, which was for a more stringent 20mph fixed barrier test. Ford, and the rest of the industry, had been working toward the 1969 proposal, in the absence of any other guideline, and had already spent a lot of money towards meeting it, and now had to basically start over again when it switched on them before they had even finished.
When evaluating proposed regulations, NHTSA used the dollar figure of $200,000 per life, and weighed the cost of new safety regulations against the number of lives saved based on that. Ford submitted a study to the government, using the government’s own cost/benefit formula, to compare the cost of the fixed barrier and moving barrier standards, applied to the entire domestic industry, not just their own cars, and not just the Pinto, reiterating that they were already close to fully meeting the 20mph moving barrier standard and that the 20mph fixed barrier test would offer too marginal of an improvement to be justified based on its substantially greater cost
Mother Jones magazine intentionally distorted their reporting on the memo, leading to a public misunderstanding of what it was actually about and the background behind it. The fact is the Pinto exceeded federal safety standards for rear impact and fuel system integrity in place on the date it started production and Ford was actually trying to work ahead of regulators in meeting speculative or proposed regulations before they were put in place
My first thought was that most of these cars rotted out well before needing a new air filter.
That’s ok. The head would warp before you’d need to change this. When I was a kid someone abandoned a brown Vega on our farm. My dad acquired it, took it home to Raleigh, and removed the head. After it got back from the machine shop he put it on the curb and sold it for $500. Every day he would go out and raise the price like ten bucks to get buyers to move fast. It worked!
In my junior year in college, 1972-1973, my flatmate had a Vega. It was often broken. He would be cursing it out while working on it in the driveway. The guys in the bible study house next door would be watching him and giggling at the expletives. This was in upstate NY.
“I was called upon by the corporation to tout the car far beyond my personal convictions about it.”
TL:DR I was ordered to lie lie lie.
“In the case of the air cleaner, the all-in-one design would have simplified assembly, speeding the production line to some greater or lesser degree. Normally, the operation would take four stages—install the air cleaner base, then a filter, then the lid, and finally a wingnut. Having a single-part air cleaner with an integrated filter would reduce this to two operations—put the cleaner on, and tighten the nut.”
Or, I dunno, just spec the two part air cleaner to be preassembled by the vendor so all the line worker need to is “put the cleaner on, and tighten the nut.”
Yeah, or just throw it in the trunk for the dealer to install as part of PDI, not like the air cleaner is really essential for the quick drive out of the plant to the holding yard, holding yard onto train, train into other holding yard, other holding yard onto truck, and truck into dealer lot, few quick runs of a fraction of a mile each wouldn’t do anything noticeable to the engine, especially given all it’s other design flaws
I remember having one of these in stock at our store, many many moons ago.
Man. Lots of Vega hate here this week! Not saying it’s undeserved, it’s just such a rare car for anyone to talk about so to see articles on it 2 days in a row is shocking.
No no no, they did it to make more money. I’m a professional GM apologist, but I can’t help but be extremely cynical on this one. They made so many incorrect decisions on the Vega, it just hurts my heart.