NEW CORVETTE SHOULD NOT BE CAR OF THE YEAR
Auto journalists didn’t have enough time test driving it, writes David Booth.
Chevrolet’s new C8 Corvette was just voted the North American Car of the Year (NACOTY. It could hardly be considered a surprise, the newly mid-engined ’Vette generating more news coverage than any car since Volkswagen reintroduced the Beetle back in 1998.
Corvette aficionados were giddy, traditional supercar manufacturers were (rightfully) nervous, and normally jaundiced auto journalists, who are paid hard currency to turn a skeptical eye to anything with four wheels, couldn’t keep from stroking its sultry curves.
And a fine job The General did with those curves. Unmistakably Corvette from the front and rear — so longtime loyalists would not feel abandoned in the transition to modernity — the C8 then reverted to an amalgam of a Ferrari and an Acura NSX from the side. Automakers looking to remake an icon always tread a fine line between traditional and avant-garde, and no one in the history of North American automotive design has done a better job than Corvette chief designer Tom Peters.
The cabin’s redesign is almost as radical as the chassis, failing only to achieve Audi-like goodness as a result of a bit of Cheap Charlie-ing in the gauge cluster. Throw in GM’S magnetic dampers, with greater adjustability than any supercar I’ve tested, and a yet-again-reborn smallblock V-8 whose performance — three seconds flat from zero to 100 km/h from an “entry-level”supercar, is nothing short of amazing — keeps on belying its age, and there’s no denying the Corvette of gearheads’ dreams has arrived.
Somehow packaged so its $69,995 base price is attainable by many of those dreamers, and there’s a sense of unreality that it’s all a little to good to be true. But it’s still not car of the year. Oh, it might be. It most certainly, as I have detailed above, has the potential. But for now, I — in fact, we — simply don’t know.
Here’s the problem. No one — or, more accurately, none of the NACOTY jurors I know, yours truly included — has driven the new Corvette in anger. GM parsed out a precious few C8s to its loyal outlets — Road and Track, Motor Trend, and a few others — for full, racetrack-based evaluations. Unfortunately, most were restricted to a 50-kilometre trundle through suburban Detroit in rush-hour traffic.
So, although I can swear to the attributes noted above, I — and I am assuming my fellow jurors as well — have no idea whether the new Corvette is indeed super.
One of the dirty secrets of car of the year testing is that journalists/jurors don’t always have the opportunity for a comprehensive test of every car on the ballot. Often, just like our suburban crawl in the Corvette, seat time is precious. In most cases, it doesn’t matter; these jurors are the creme de la creme of auto scribes, their finely honed butts able to accredit a normal vehicle’s attributes in short order.
That’s not the case with the new Corvette. More than any car in recent memory — and I am including such track-oriented stalwarts as the Mclaren Senna and Lamborghini’s Huracan Performante — the mid-engined ’Vette will be judged by its ability to hare through hairpins and scythe through sweepers.
No one complained about the C7’s outright speed, a lack of horsepower, or visual excitement. Even its harshest detractors would admit it was an exciting car to drive. In others words, the transition from C7 to C8 was unnecessary, unless Chevrolet specifically wanted to directly challenge its mid-engined competition in the harshest environment possible: the racetrack.
Even more simply put, if the C8 is not the equal of Ferrari, Lamborghini and Mclaren, all GM’S efforts would have been for naught. If it could match the 488, Huracan and the 575 GT, then at $69,995, the mid-engine ’Vette would be a success unparalleled.
Unfortunately, I simply have no way of knowing whether it can or can’t. I suspect it will prevail. I will even risk an accusation of bias by hoping it will, but I simply don’t know. That’s why I did not nominate the Corvette for Car of the Year. And I don’t think any of my fellow jurors who didn’t manage to blag a racetrack test should have, either.