CHEVROLET CERV III, 1990
In a world where so many things don’t make sense, we love a bit of plain-spoken charm. Take Chevrolet’s CERV III concept car – it stands for Corporate Engineering Research Vehicle Three. It’s a vehicle the company built in order to do a bit of research. The third one, in fact. CERVs I and II were test vehicles from 1960 and 1964 respectively.
The first one had an open-topped racecar vibe and was designed to be a pure car from which the engineers could test all sorts of handling traits. The second one was more of a prototype sports racer, all about pushing performance, its meaty V8 taking it to 60mph from zero in less than three seconds and then on to a top speed of 210mph.
CERV III was unveiled at the Detroit show in 1990, the time when cars started to move past the angular, wedgy designs of the Seventies and Eighties into something a bit more fluid and high-tech. Along the lines of the other cars, its mantra was more of a “let’s see what high-tech stuff we can ram into a supercar” sort of thing.
So the CERV III had rear-wheel steering, computer controlled active suspension (very early Nineties F1, that) and used such exciting materials as aluminium honeycomb-reinforced carbon fibre, Nomex and Kevlar for light weight. The suspension was even made of titanium. Someone was going all out to win the exotic materials round of Top Trumps, but the ultimate concept car touch is, as we all know, the scissor door, and the Chevrolet featured not one, but two of those. The show-offs.
The concept car’s real party piece was its mid-engine set-up. Chevrolet shoehorned a Lotus-fettled 650bhp 5.7-litre twin-turbo V8 behind the seats and the car was tested from 0–60mph in 3.9 seconds with a top speed of 225mph. In your face, Jaguar XJ220. To deal with all that the CERV III had both four-wheel drive and steering, and featured dual disc brakes on each wheel. The CERV’s automatic comprised Chevrolet’s three-speed Hydramatic gearbox linked to a custom-built two-speed transmission, all controlled by computer. Bonkers.
The thinking, when the CERV III project was underway, was that it would have made a delightful and sophisticated Corvette. The C5 version of the US icon was supposed to be arriving in 1993, and you can see some of it in the concept car’s roof and bonnet, but the production date slipped back further and further as Chevrolet suffered financial woes and engineers were forced to strip back all the fanciness. The firm’s flagship sports car wouldn’t go mid-engined until 2020, but maybe with all those suave Euro coupes about the place this was for the best, and the Corvette retained its brutish, plain spoken charm.