The
Chevy Corvair was indeed inspired by the popular
VW Beetle. The rear-mounted engine used a six-cylinder horizontally opposed
engine with dual
carbs. It had a long fan belt that popped off on occasion, and when it was running it sounded like a six-cylinder
Hoover.
I owned a 1961 Monza version of the Corvair, which had the dangerous exposed split rear axles. Replacing the starter motor required an hour just to remove the engine shroud that ducted cool air around the engine, which did not have a radiator.
The dangerous part was not that it had problems when it rained, it was the rear axles. Should one of the tires drop about four inches, like off of the paved part of a highway, that whole tire assembly would collapse, causing a spin and (in most cases) a rollover.
This is the car that made Ralph Nader famous, after he wrote a book called Unsafe at Any Speed.
Many of the Corvairs were stripped of their bodies and converted into a six-cylinder dune buggy.