Woman Takes Her Corvair for an Eternal Cruise

Three decades after Ralph Nader portrayed the Corvair as a casket on wheels in his book “Unsafe at Any Speed,” 84-year-old Rose Martin was laid to rest in her beloved 1962 model.

“She prearranged with us, and this was her wish. It was very well known throughout Tiverton that she wanted this,” said Robert Ferreira, a director of the Oliveira Funeral Home in Fall River, Mass.

The widow and mother of three, who died Saturday, drove the flat-looking rear-engine white car around the town of Tiverton, population 14,000, for 36 years.

“She just loved the car. She didn’t care what it cost to fix the car. If the car was broken, she wasn’t one to ask you how much. ‘Just fix it,’ ” recalled Tiverton Auto Body owner George Murray.

Mourners at her burial at Pocasset Hill Cemetery grinned through their tears as six police officers acting as pallbearers slid the inlaid wood coffin into an opening in the rear of the Corvair, which had been altered to accommodate the casket.

The car was then lowered into the ground with a crane. It took up four burial plots. An old handicapped license plate, held with a rubber band on the visor, was removed and handed to Martin’s relatives.

The Corvair was a popular car in the 1960s before it was buried by the rise of the muscle car and the 1965 expose written by Nader, who said it had serious steering and control problems.

But to Martin, a talkative and no-nonsense woman who served as a police matron tending to female prisoners at the town jail, the low-slung car with four front headlights was a gem.

She was laid to rest next to her husband, with a headstone showing a picture of her and the car.