Corvette C8 Convertible Review - Better Topless - Test Drive | Everyday Driver

so this is a corvette c8 we actually have driven one before for television yes we have we have not driven this version though because this is the convertible hey check it out so the 1953 car the very first corvette was introduced as a convertible so it just kind of makes sense that we're back in the eighth generation the newest corvette as a convertible only and you'll see people who have the targa top off the hard top so they'll take that roof panel off and people might think that it is convertible indeed it is not because this is a hard top convertible it fully disappears and the best part is corvette engineers have figured out when there's more heat trapped in there by the convertible top they've figured out how to get it out of there you're watching everyday driver we make a tv show podcast and youtube channels dedicated to great cars driving adventures and helping you find a car you'll love subscribe and hit the bell so you don't miss a thing so new convertible we're going to put the windows up for the benefit of audio but the other thing about it is if you look at this with the convertible top down it has very much a style like the current mclaren or ferrari convertibles i mean that's high praise it actually looks like a normal coupe when it's all closed up and then you drop all the pieces and it has these great little humps at the back it looks a lot like the mclaren and ferraris right now yeah it does you're obligated to look at this car when you see it everybody is obligated it's like fly paper for your eyeballs yes because when you do everybody will say wow even if they don't know what it is yeah they'll say that's that's pretty awesome car which means to me that the aura of corvette has returned certainly has been changed in the modern times for sure disappeared about the third generation of the corvette i think it went away it's no longer a special wow you got a corvette okay got a sports car there's many sports cars on the market but the aura to me of the car has returned because everybody looks at this car you're right everybody gapes at this car totally because of our american original film we drove every version and we we definitely understand the specialness of corvette but unless you were a person that already liked them when the new one came out you kind of didn't care right and i think this is a car that has blasted past all of that i have had at least two people say to me just since we got the press car that's a corvette they're just they're shocked by that reality i think that says everybody's not following along with automotive media yes on the planet absolutely sees this thing and thinks is that a and hmm and then to go to go one further the people that have seen it only on the internet see it in person and go that's a lot better than i thought it was gonna be that looks really great there was a lot of controversy and we've talked about it as well you've even redesigned it about should this look different than it does but i do have to say in person it is commanding there is that presence of more expensive cars yes the things that all these expensive high-end cars have and you think wow you're something special yeah and now the top goes down so the people can see inside who is driving the car and has this exquisite taste yes this commanding presence you've picked that car and the best part about it is with this aura fully loaded 3lt as it is with the z51 package it is 85 330 which is shocking you can't buy anything else now it's not the future performance models but the performance that you get for this kind of money which is what corvette has always been about yes yes which is astounding 85 000 buys you aura now buys you a car that is going to drop some jaws i agree with that now the only downside hang on two things that work there first off this still has a classic american chevrolet v8 in it which doesn't sound like any of the engines you normally find in an exotic looking mid engine like this it's a totally different sound and feel it has that muscle car feel in an exotic package which is very unique also at play there was this dual clutch transmission from chevy which is honestly superb it's really really quick and that wasn't even me using the paddles you can use the paddles at any time it listens instantly it is eight speeds it wants to be high but you can put it into the sporting modes or the track modes it will listen like crazy but even just driving normally it's a great automatic and then it is quick when you need it to be i will continually say this statement about the new c8 corvette and that is it is the most compromised car ever built and i say that as a massive compliment because you think about any category and the corvette has addressed that i hate that car manufacturers continually use the game of golf as a metric around which to design their sports cars you might say paul well you can take your sports car and go golfing i would say to you you've stopped driving your sports car why would you stop to play golf take your truck or your suv to go play golf totally agree but the advantage is a huge amount of trunk space in the rear as much as the hard top and the frunk in the front yep which makes it a brilliantly usable sports car all year round and you'll say okay it can't do blank category well you name it you can drive it all year round and it's fun to drive you can take it to the track you can cruise in it you can do canyon roads like this it does every category and because they continually have compromised the car to suit every size and shape of body and every weight of person to try to do in and out easily because of how the new chassis is built it serves everybody and it looks brilliant we still have to talk about styling and let's talk about the interior briefly there's this wall right here i call it the wall of corvette it separates the passenger in a huge way more so than any other car really well what it's doing is covering up where you change the sport modes the transmission here i don't feel like it's intrusive even though it leans into the passenger it seems like it would be but when you sit there it kind of isn't it doesn't but it covers up this huge central tunnel you've read about all the the construction and from the very beginning this corvette was designed as a convertible first like many prior generations of the corvette have been but we enthusiasts hate convertibles because the structural integrity it goes away you don't feel it as much i agree continually feeling and looking and is that you know i'm feeling the cowl and the top of the windshield header and is it jittery is it jiggly it's pretty good i have a apparently abnormally large torso and so i end up hitting my head on a lot of cars now unfortunately with the top closed my head is touching which can get annoying however in the convertible there isn't a cross beam here of support that there is and in the coop i couldn't put my head back without having the seat perfectly adjusted because i would brain myself on a structural beam that is not here in the convertible so i actually prefer the convertible because i can get more comfortable and the only actual downside i can say for this press car right here okay is it's late fall in utah when we're shooting this yeah and the press fleet does something we genuinely typically appreciate and that is they put winter tires on it fair enough fair enough i have instantly felt that we have had to throttle back a lot because this is a car that is not light we're talking 3 700 pounds or so and it is mid-engine so they did create some understeer initially to protect the buyer ferrari does this the lotus has it this is not a new thing in managing cars you're protecting your buyer yeah but you take the tires back from the ps4 as we had on the prior version we did and you can instantly tell on this chassis you can you can tell that the chassis is very stiff to your point very stiff very agile but now it's massively under tired and i find myself kind of taking it easy a little bit because i'm going to do these tires aren't great you're backing it off but it doesn't take away the fact that this this feels special to drive for 85 000 again the specialness of these expensive cars well yeah they're special but you can carry the ferrari owners luggage and yours for 85 000 what's so interesting about this interior is the compromise but it doesn't seem compromised it's wrapped around the driver here and the engineers designed this car to have the center of gravity near the hip point so the inside driver's hip so kind of right in here which is the rotation and you're right those tires do let the car down big time you're driving it in the fall and in the winter you still get to drive your car and it's still fun and i would drive this year-round i would absolutely drive this year this has the z-51 package which means it has the electronic limited slip differential so it is actually a viable car for year-round use i know they're talking about an all-wheel drive might be coming with electric motor in the front i'll say something to you the steering on this has gotten really interesting because there's not any weight in the front i think once you put batteries in an engine up there it's going to kind of ruin the steering i think it's going to be a challenge because there's something special going on in the steering right now that is inherent to the mid engine platform true but it's in corvette for the first time it could be fine but yes once you add the weight just like we felt on career fours and all-wheel drive mid-engine cars you feel it you sense it more there's there's a thicker wall between you and the glorious driving experience which is still here even on winter tires yes i do think that the understeer is revealed by the winter tires more so than the ps4 i'll give you another car that understeers much more than you think the new acura nsx all-wheel drive has an understeer problem the audi r8 an understeer problem now that can be tuned out this is a mid-engine reality more than is a corvette reality but then here's the flip side when we had it on ps4s i don't think you're ever going to find understeer if you drive it well on a public road okay i think you'll find it on the track i think it will reveal itself on the track sure but if you find drive it well on a public road we did not apologize when we drove it and we were on a big sweeper road and there was never a hint no understeer and just centerline rotation but then if you want to really continue to do track days you're going to set up the car differently you're going to do things to mitigate that understeer fine but the fact that this gives you that balance again back to my compromised comment everybody can drive this i i have to drive this yeah the fact that's very intriguing the fact is you are talking about people driving this car that have never driven mid-engine before i hate to say this but as a designer as a person that's an engineer you have to give them understeer to keep from killing some of them yeah you have to agree to put it in gear you have this switch gear it looks a little bit complicated but actually it's just two levers that pull up and two push buttons that's it so put it in drive all you do is pull up on that button you can put it in m mode here so you can put it in manual and that means you can shift yourself which is great and then your modes are under this palm rest and this is where you change mode so i see you've gone to the z button right you've got it programmed for z which is that homage to zora arcus dunton that's your personal sporty settings right so you can set it here in the in the interface and then that's your personal you know this is the way i want to interact with the car this gear shift mode selector makes it very clear there will never be a manual on this car and honestly yeah as a guy that loves manual transmissions and i totally agree with the involvement that it creates it's too bad there won't be a manual i know you don't necessarily agree having said that though when you drive this car you realize it's not like we started with an automatic it'll be a manual there isn't a place to put it it's just this eight speed this dual clutch from gm is almost as good as porsche's pdk i i agree i think it's 95 98 to porsche's pdk and they are the standard bearer as far as having a dual clutch that reads your mind and then can be just a boring automatic if need be it's great i've loved the dual clutch on here because of the consistent power output to the ground of this engine sure and i love that corvette has designed a car that takes an old-school pushrod v8 the lt2 engine and combines it with a modern mid-engine really well-balanced car i can feel the slippage there's the tires yes yes these winter tires let this thing down and you could still go quickly and it is still incredibly well balanced i'm still fine yeah yeah yeah but there's still a little kind of little helmet there just much more than there should be yeah that doesn't mean the fun has been reduced no well it's been reduced it hasn't been removed it's still a fun car to drive but you can feel that this car is just the chassis is now far better than the tires yeah again it's a little cold that's why we're wearing long sleeves right and the cold is really coming and you could drive this year round i would drive this year-round i absolutely would yes you should well when nissan introduced the gt-r their entire mantra was that anybody could get lap times and extract all of the performance out of the car the new corvette is almost as easy to drive it's a very easy to drive car and again back to compromise that means people who don't know how to drive manuals or can't for health reasons can own this car and still extract a lot of driving fun out of it but this car is not as easy to find the edge as the nissan gt-r in that sort of recipe there's still a lot of driver skill that you have to bring to this car i agree to go find it yeah yeah which means the which capability of this is harder to find it's further out there than the gtr which just kind of lays it all bare and goes i'll do the lap for you exactly right you're just along for the ride exactly and then there's the power 495 horsepower out of this car i look forward to future performance versions when there's going to be even more but yeah 0 to 60 in under three seconds under three look there will be more power bursts but i submit this to you short of bragging rights it's unnecessary this is a lightning quick card in under three seconds for as you're saying under 100 grand i actually specced one out myself last night did you i put extra stuff on it i got it to 90. okay and it was literally i personally couldn't find anything else i wanted and that was 90 grand under a hundred thousand dollars again for the aura of an exotic and it is that corvette continues to do that accessibility for the price for the performance even at this base level we haven't even been in the z06 or future cr1 or zora whatever it's coming is that the high end and you know the chassis will have to be tuned differently but still there is fun it's still fun to drive other versions coming to this point that you're making about the exotic nature of this i don't think the corvette has ever been exotic it has always been probably really more interesting to look at and more fun than you expected and then when you think about yeah but it's just a corvette then somebody says yeah but it's so cheap it makes up for whatever the problem was this has an exotic flair to it and it is still that cheap which is really surprising it has never had that exotic feel it has achieved it with going mid-engine and then it still isn't as expensive as frankly i kind of expected it to be and kind of think it should have been what i love is speed out of this thing these corners i'm really focused on my line and my apexes and my cornering yeah and the shifts right there yep yeah sure you'd still be in you know your arms moving your left leg's moving okay and i would like that i think it would be distracting from enjoying what this platform and what this engine can do i maintain that automotive journalists have said oh if it only had a manual it'd be better i disagree and i think the corvette c8 proves that a hundred percent because the gear shifts are so great they are great so they are well they have nailed this transmission it is superb that was just great yes and to be even in the realm of a pdk is is staggering especially for a first dual clutch i think they have nailed this transmission i have nothing to take away from the quality of this dual clutch i actually would almost rather go a little slower to be engaged but fair i look forward honestly to driving one of these having really the ability to drive it really hard on a track with a track setup but what i find amazing is you won't find that understeer that's getting discussed in any way that most people use it i think on the track guess what happens you discover you're in the base first version of the c8 when you think about the fact that the c7 was a phenomenal track car actually so was the c6 so it was a c5 but the ones that were phenomenal were z06s or grand sports or zr1s those are the ones that were great right this is great in this base form it's going to get crazier from here from a track perspective that's nuts more money it'll cost more money yes and okay but better than this the more i'm around the c8 corvette the more i like it i was unconvinced from photos and you think yeah the telephoto lens and it just it doesn't set it off that's not how cars are designed you're next to it you're sitting in it you're interacting with it and your relationship that spatial distance from you to the car is what that aura is and the more i'm around this car the more i drive it the more i want one it's become exotic it's become desirable to people beyond just corvette people or people beyond just muscle car people which is what it needed to do yeah i love that this is where it starts the interior for the first time actually really feels like an eighty thousand dollar car i agree this hierarchy here i know in pictures it looks like i've been it looks strange i feel like i've got space yeah i don't feel like i'm isolated when you actually sit here you realize that that wall is really low it's not bothersome to your eye and then you look down and go oh that just makes sense it's just right here it's got a hierarchy there's no perfect car there isn't no but this one as far as the compromises and what they've done to accommodate golf and tracking and cruising and just the convertible thing and car shows and make it look special the corvette's way up there they they have genuinely made a special car okay full stop so now you have to aspire to buy one so get in line don't overpay you're going to overpay right now you may have to wait because don't pay markup phenomenal card don't pay markup sorry quick end rant don't pay markup but you should have one because they are if here's the thing if you're sitting there thinking i kind of think this car is cool then i bet you if you drove it you'd think it's awesome

Channel: TestDrive

Views: 37,383

Rating: 4.8842592 out of 5

Keywords: 2021 Chevrolet Corvette Convertible Review, 2021 C8 Corvette Convertible, Corvette Convertible Review, Test Drive, Everyday Driver, Audi R8, Acura NSX, DCT, PDK, Comparison, Review, Better Topless, 2020 Corvette, C8 Corvette

Id: cUXCEy29-UE

Length: 18min 47sec (1127 seconds)

Published: Thu Dec 10 2020