The Complete History of the Corvette

it's usually standard for me to have a prologue for each RCR story to set up the story I'm about to tell and why I'm telling it but that feels kind of pointless for this because well I didn't really set out to do this topic it wasn't planned months in advance I it was during the writing of the C1 Corvette review almost two months ago that I realized I had more that I wanted to write about than I could include in the script for that video then so I did I just kept writing and within a week I realized well I guess I'm doing this this isn't necessarily a story about a car or about a singular individual even though it is mostly focused on people like Harley Earl and Zora Arcus duntov I mean all those things are true but this is really a story about success and its many fathers and a car that has even today as many enthusia as detractors yet it's a car that I don't think deserves the stereotypical bad rap it gets at least not on its own so let's look at its history and try to see why the Corvette is so revered why it's so divisive we'll also naturally look at the people responsible for etching the car's place in Automotive History alongside their own but the goal here is to give an idea of the minds behind the creation of the Corvette and the popularity that has sustained it for nearly 70 years so sit back just hang out as we get into some Automotive History these are the early years of the Corvette oh God that was such a bad joke now look you can't you can't talk about the history of the Corvette without discussing a towering name in the legacy of automotive design Mr Harley J Earl this is The Man Who Would Not only designed the Corvette but shaped The Narrative around it in its early years as a cutting-edge accomplishment in American sports cars and automotive design and it fits Harley Earl is the quintessential example of the American dream writ large and it all started with his father Jacob William J W Earl a former Lumberjack and woodworker from Cadillac Michigan who took a chance and moved out west in the late 19th century owing to the plummeting prices of train tickets out to California at that time it was 1889 when J.W Earl founded his own Carriage business in Los Angeles known as Earl Carriage works Point JW was still his own man no wife no children no mouths to feed at all just a 23 year old guy taking a gamble on himself and it paid off as the wealthy citizens of Los Angeles flocked to his shop either to commission JW to build them a carriage or to repair the horse-drawn carriages they already owned it wasn't long before JW Earl's reputation preceded him and he gained respect within the community of course it's not exactly a revelation to say so but a successful business has a way of making a man valuable to people who might not otherwise have noticed him case in point JW's sudden involvement with two of the more prominent families in Los Angeles at that time the hazards and the tafts Henry Hazard was a businessman with the name akin to a spin-off Nickelodeon superhero he co-founded the iconic hazards Pavilion a venue that hosted everything from opera singers like Enrico Caruso to speakers like Booker T Washington and William Jennings Bryan the venue also hosted boxing featuring the early years of future world champions Jim Jefferies and Jack Johnson because if your initials are JJ I guess your odds of becoming world champion Jurassic go up at sacrifice hailing from Illinois Hazard had his wildest times in Los Angeles like when he tried to shout down an angry mob during the Chinese Massacre of 1871 only to nearly get himself shot to pieces in the process never mind that he was doing this wall covered in lather you know having interrupted his own shave at the local barber shop to try and calm the rioters and that's a big deal considering how much of a luxury a hot shave is for a man even now seriously just just treat yourself one of these days it's worth it I promise in keeping with the adventurous Hazard name Henry owned a big ass Indiana Jones whip he used to Wrangle mules he also owned racehorses and later cars that he would drive with according to his obituary quote the same enthusiasm he displayed in handling his horses end quote Henry Hazard was rugged and daring and ambitious so it wasn't surprising when he became the mayor of Los Angeles in 1889 while it was a position he would only hold until 1893 the hazard name had been firmly established in the community his wife would soon give birth to a daughter Mary Eleanor hazard and this is where the stories come a little closer to intersecting you see Mary Eleanor Hazard would eventually marry a man by the name of Harley Taft of the prominent Los Angeles tafts and no it's not the same family that gave us President William Howard Taft and there aren't really any wild stories to share about them although they were responsible for founding the renowned Taft building on Hollywood and Vine it was the first high-rise office building in Los Angeles and it would later house the offices of some of the major motion picture studios of the early 20th century in addition to the personal offices of Charlie Chaplin and Will Rogers among others we'll get to later but even before all that the tafts were well-off respected family so it was inevitable that the well-to-do hazards would marry off their daughter to another well-off Angelino in the form of Harley Taft the merging of these two affluent families resulted in a daughter Abby L Taft and naturally that young woman would be highly eligible in Los Angeles Society upon reaching adulthood which brings us back to J.W Earl having achieved success in business through his Carriage company he became a reasonable Prospect for young Abby and so in June 1891 J.W Earl and Abby L Taft were wed a year later they would have their first son Carl Everett Earl followed by Harley Jefferson Earl in 1893 and then Arthur Jesse and William Earl all born between 1896 and 1908 respectively but with all due respect to the extended family let's skip all that and zero in on Harley it was November 22nd 1893 when Harley J Earl was born and yes he was named after Abby's father Harley Taft but he inherited his father's work ethic as well as his mother's dedication since she was instrumental in helping JW build their family home on a five-acre plot in Hollywood with her own two hands you can also say he inherited the Taft family industriousness along with Henry hazard's adventurous ambition because when you come from a family of go-getters it makes sense that you eventually resolve to carve out your own path in the family tradition the early 20th century brought the proliferation of the automobile and the rise of businesses focusing on the emergent mode of transportation case in point the arrival of the Los Angeles area's Seoul Cadillac dealership run by a Mr Don Lee a Northwestern Military Institute graduate from Chicago who'd spent some time in Detroit and and became understandably enamored of the auto business Lee's dealership was just across the street from J.W Earl's successful downtown plan on a spot that would come to be known as Auto row as cars became more desirable and in some cases more affordable JW changed the name of the family business to Earl automobile Works in line with growing demand and Harley and his older brother Carl would work in their father's plan at around this time Harley began to take an interest in engineering building his own one passenger soapbox Racers to compete against his friends but Harley's dream didn't begin to crystallize until a vacation in 1909. at Bailey's Ranch the family's vacation spot near the San Fernando Valley Harley and his younger brother Arthur were playing by a stream when Harley discovered a mound of clay and decided to build cars except he only Built the type of cars he would want to see himself in fact the cars He sculpted were unlike anything anyone had seen as his father would later say that Harley's models were quote damn near full size were not like cars of the day but as they might be later in the future it was really kind of eerie seeing all those rounded off car bodies in a period when automobiles were mainly just boxes on Wheels end quote Harley showed an affinity for design the talent that would be nurtured in the years ahead while complementing the family business you see in the 1910s JW Earl had started to craft custom car accessories and parts and by 1912 he was making custom bodies in his downtown LA plant along with commercial body Construction at the same time Harley was attending USC and would eventually transfer to Stanford University to study engineering but he took art classes as well to supplement the engineering classes he was already taking timing is everything as the early 1910s saw Earl automobile Works become one of the nation's largest automobile plants even in spite of the emergent first world war you see they were doing customs and transportation contracts with movie studios and Harley himself would do the art for these custom cars and this earned him a reputation as a talented and Innovative designer which sent his rates skyrocketing as he became highly requested in the automotive community so much so that he was privately contracted by some of the biggest celebrities of his day silent movie star Tom Mix no relation to our buddy and regular beer reviews co-host of the same name commissioned Harley to customize a car to match his old west Cowboy aesthetic right down to a genuine leather saddle on the roof even Hollywood icon Cecil B Demille got in on the fun getting the coach work for his cars done by Harley to accompany his Fleet of personal luxury vehicles which included a Cunningham a Lincoln an accord l-29 Roadster but Harley's most famous creation of the time was for early film Legend Roscoe Fatty Arbuckle the custom model utilized the largest chassis available in America at the time the 1918 Pierce Arrow Model 66 featuring a 147.5 inch wheelbase and an 855 cubic inch t-head6 for just the chassis Arbuckle was said to have paid six thousand dollars which comes out to roughly 77 600 today this didn't even factor in the special hubs and Burmese teak wood Wheels with nickel plated rims or the barrel-shaped headlamps the bright purplish paint job the leather upholstered interior or the hidden compartment below the rear foot rests rumored to have been used to hide liquor during prohibition Arbuckle made a bunch of requests and Harley was all too capable of fulfilling them all these features supposedly added at least 25 thousand dollars to the cost of the car and the thirty one thousand dollars R Buckle is said to have paid totals to just under half a million dollars in 2020 money however it was worth it for the publicity not just for our Buckle but for Dom Lee and Harley Earl the car caused such a stir that Don Lee displayed it in his showroom garnering a crowd of roughly 10 000 people over the course of the approximate week it's spent there according to a May 2nd 1920 article for the Los Angeles Times titled Arbuckle's car is a genuine Knockout by now Harley Earl had dropped out of school and dedicated all of his time to the Auto industry it was 1919 and Don Lee's business was growing as well with the LA Times reporting Lee's Milestone ten thousandth Cadillac sold in California off the back of his profitable margins Don Lee was able to buy out his neighbor across the street Earl Auto Works You could argue that it was a power play to gain access to Harley's roster of high-profile clientele which is backed up by Lee's decision to hire the 26 year old as general manager for the Don Lee coach and body Corporation but even though you could argue it's weird to work for the guy who bought the family business from your father this was the beginning of a fruitful five-year partnership between Dom Lee and Harley Earl together the two men produced some 1 000 custom cars for the Rich and Famous as J.W Earl entered a period of semi-retirement and Harley settled into married life with his high school sweetheart Harley also began registering his design techniques with the U.S patent office as the intersection between the auto and oil Industries transformed Southern California into one of the preeminent hubs of early 20th century car culture with America enduring the age of prohibition Harley Earl was making inroads with potential business partners namely Alfred Fisher of the world famous Automotive family said to have built the body of the Detroit Auto industry as the byline of Alfred Fisher's Automotive Hall of Fame induction reads not unlike Harley Fisher's father was a carriage maker and he followed in his Father's Footsteps alongside his six brothers together the brothers founded the Fisher body company which was the world's biggest Auto Body manufacturer by 1914 producing some 370 000 car bodies for everyone from Buick and Cadillac to Ford and Chevrolet by the 1920s Fisher had become GM's in-house coach Building Division which provided an opening for Harley to earn a spot with the automotive Giant now you might wonder why Harley would even want to work for a large corporation if he was already making a good living doing what he was already doing well there was a good reason basically Harley felt that auto Executives like Henry Ford lacked imagination and the only way to affect real change was from within of course Harley wasn't afraid to share these opinions with his new friend Alfred Fisher and so he began pitching Alfred and his brother Lawrence Fisher of the Cadillac wing of GM on the prospect of taking the types of cars he was designing for movie stars and getting them into mass production through GM with the goal of moving his business to Detroit to design cars for everybody rather than just for the fatty Arbuckles of the world not that things were going all that great for our Buckle at this point anyway I really want to stay on topic but if you want to know about the infamous Fatty Arbuckle trials Google is your friend needless to say it's an incredibly sad story for everyone involved fascinating yes but just an absolutely miserable slog of a tail I won't get into here but if you're a true crime fanatic I mean go for it but sorry moving on so now Harley is under consideration to head up a new line of companion cars for Cadillac ultimately being hired as a Consulting engineer for the company largely because he didn't want to work for Henry Ford or Walter Chrysler men whose Visions for the future he didn't share Harley's design instincts had a cinematic Flair owing to his time in Hollywood building car bodies for future members of The Academy of Motion Picture Arts and Sciences whose headquarters at that time was big surprise the Taft building the aforementioned Hollywood Landmark founded by his mother's side of the family and on the subject of the academy their Oscar statuette featured the golden guy holding a sword supposedly meant to evoke the legendary French explorer Renee Robert Cavalier De La Salle a man who would become the namesake for one of Harley's great early Creations the 1927 LaSalle and the LaSalle brand was intended to be something of a companion to Cadillac which also took its name from another French explorer Antoine de la moth Cadillac the founder of Detroit and the namesake of J.W Earl's Hometown so yeah everything seems connected in a weird way however despite being a companion brand Harley's 1927 LaSalle was an impressive performer proving to be such a success that it earned him notice from GM director Alfred P Sloan who would hire Harley to lead GM's art and color section suddenly a car's aesthetic was becoming as important as its practical function which was Harley's entire philosophy in the first place everything was coming up Milhouse for Harley Earl as he finally got to express his vision for the future of American automotives and he may not have gotten there without the Fishers who by 1926 had sold the last 18 percent of their stock and Fisher body to GM for an estimated 208 million dollars which comes out to over 3 billion dollars in 2020 that is ridiculous money it's important to note because the fissures essentially helped Harley get through the door which is not to say he wouldn't have eventually gotten there on his own anyway but then who really gets anywhere alone you know for example while the fissures helped Harley make inroads it was Alfred P Sloan who helped launch Harley's career as a man of genuine influence in the Auto industry as it was together that Sloane and Harley came up with the plan to implement Dynamic obsolescence also known as planned obsolescence which you still see with cars today though far more often with things like smartphones and tablets and I guess some video game consoles basically the plan was to purposely redesign cars with the goal of making previous designs look outdated by comparison if not altogether obsolete by the time the new design hit the market this is tied into the plan for annual model change which essentially changed the way we identify cars because it linked specific models to specific years or Generations so that a 1927 Chevrolet was different from a 1922 model and you could tell the year by those differences and while this likely would have happened anyway there was an additional component of Sloan's approach that of the ladder of consumption historian Daniel borsten credits Sloan with turning cars into quote a visible and easily understood symbol of personal progress end quote in essence a guy at a new Chevrolet was more well-off than the guy in the five-year-old model but the man in the Buick was doing better than either the ladder of consumption was reflected in automotive design with Harley growing more ambitious as the years wore on for his part Harley wanted to progress towards more aerodynamic designs as evidenced by the LaSalle which earned him his reputation as an industrial designer Forward Design work became key to the advancement of GM cars on the principle of Harley's Mantra that quote appearance and function are of parallel importance end quote to this end Harley became a bit of a Target in the realm of corporate Espionage as rival automakers tried to sneak photographs of his forward car designs like Arthur slugworth paying off children to steal an everlasting Gobstopper except these slugworths weren't secretly working for the good guys by 1930 You could argue Harley was closer with Lawrence Fisher than he was with Alfred Fisher as Harley and Lawrence partnered on the 1930 Cadillac V16 in his role as Cadillac general manager Lawrence leaked to the press that the company would build a V12 but this was an intentional misdirect and the 1930 Cadillac became one of only three production gasoline-fueled V16 engine models in history and of the three two were made by Cadillac and of those two both were paired with the Cadillac V16 car with the first generation running from 1930 to 1937 and the second generation running from 1938 to 1940. the success of the 16 cylinder engine boosted Cadillac's market share to 40 percent and the man who held the US design patent for the 16 cylinder Marvel Mr Harley J Earl and he followed that Marvel with the world's first concept in 1938 the Buick y job which featured a gun sight hood ornament because virility I guess power operated hidden headlamps actual electric windows and the classic Buick vertical waterfall Grille in addition to a Buick Super chassis Harley was also instrumental in taking turn signals and adding them to the backs of GM cars in 1938 and within two years turn signals were also a part of the front of the car along with a self-canceling mechanism for the feature now of course Harley didn't invent the turn signal but he did have a role in standardizing them in mass production cars although one wonders how much of a difference it made when half the drivers in this state don't even use them anyway Harley buried himself in his work as the now renamed GM styling Department was the biggest in the Auto industry and GM took considerable measures to protect the secrecy of what Harley was working on from his rapid prototyping techniques to his design obsolescence technology and his pre-engineering which according to the timeline on the official Harley J Earl website focused on quote math-based full-sized models that all of GM's major Rivals leading up to World War II were still struggling to unlock and figure out end quote peace would add quote Auto innovator Earl was behind how GM became so much faster at taking a car from the idea stage to reality than the competition bottom line since 1927 Harley Earl was GM's key so much faster guy and auto design was the differentiator giving the general first mover advantage and that's why this company quickly toppled Ford Motor Company's firm grip on the number one position in the Auto World Auto Design Technology started a revolution of change and modernity inside General Motors and dramatically quickened the pace of progress of all its product designs of the transportation world end quote and yet as the United States entered the second world war and commercial production of Civilian Vehicles was halted GM decided that protecting the secrecy of their process was less important than helping the war effort they met with military generals and government officials to pitch how the auto Industries manufacturing process was Superior to whatever the enemies were doing in terms of both turnaround time and over all product quality to get more Hands-On deck Harley began apprenticing women for jobs as stylists which was a harbinger of things to come as there would be a Designing Women team in the 1950s no Dixie Carter though this all women's group would be the and shout out to those who got that last joke I mean I'm sorry this all women's group would be dubbed the damsels of design by the media drawing attention to their growing stature in a male dominated industry during the war these women were vital to the continued successful operation of GM styling Department into the ongoing health of Harley Earl's entire operation during the war but this was before the Big Three escalated a war of their own Flash Forward to 1953 as both Chrysler and Ford actively pursue Talent raids from The Styling Department in order to beef up their own division with experienced designers who'd work directly under Harley Earl the other automakers were on the back foot when it came to Innovative designs and what better way to get eyeballs on their cars than to poach a few of the people responsible for bringing those designs to life granted the traditionalists weren't crazy about Harley's approach to styling but anyone would have a hard time overlooking the stir caused by some of his designs in particular the Masterpiece that ushered in the new year a concept car that debuted at Motorama in 1953 a car that would come to be one of the most recognizable American Creations in the history of the automobile industry the reason you're probably here right now let's get to it shall we it's always Corvette o'clock somewhere named after GM's German division the Corvette began as project opal and it was born from the mind of Harley Earl inside an unmarked styling studio in Detroit in June 1951. you see Harley loved sports cars and noticed how popular Jaguars and MGS and other foreign offerings were becoming after our fighting men came home from the war and when Nash Motors teamed with British engineer Donald Healy an Italian designer pin infarina to create the two-seat Nash Healey sports car Harley managed to get Chevy division Chief Tom Keating and GM president Harlow kurdick on board with the notion of crafting an American sports car on the principle that the car would be made from Mostly stock Chevy parts and could be used to improve the anemic family image of Chevrolet even if the car didn't sell all that well in its own right and there was value in a marketable roadster for Mass consumption the type of car hardly might have built for the silent movie stars and auto Executives of old but costing no more than two thousand dollars which is roughly equivalent to twenty one thousand dollars today but to do this Harley needed help so as not to create something too esoteric for anyone but gear heads and performance-minded big shots to enjoy to this end he Enlisted the aid of British engineer Maurice Ali to assist him in the development of this car along with future GM president and Engineering genius Ed Cole prior to joining project opal Cole developed Chevy small block V8 to replace the old stove bolt 6. in addition to his legacy as the future father of the rear engine Corvair meanwhile Ali was a former Rolls-Royce engineer who moved to GM to head up the company's research and development division the project also included Chevrolet body engineer Ellis James primo and Caltech engineering and Industrial design graduate Robert F McLean himself a sports car Enthusiast McLean was tasked with helping bring Harley's preliminary designs to life under Earl's Direction Ali and McLean would develop the chassis and suspension for the first gen Corvette while Primo would engineer the body the team wanted this thing ready for GM's annual Motorama Expo in January of 1953 a tall order if ever there was one the pre-production prototype ex122 was hand built utilizing the Chevrolet passenger chassis and suspension the company would use from 1949 to 1954 but moving the drivetrain and passenger compartment back for a 53-47 front to rear split on weight distribution transmission was a two-speed Powerglide automatic matched to a 3.85 liter inline 6 with hydraulic lifter known as the blue flame rated at 136 horsepower which was only slightly better than the 123 horsepower solid lifter variant known as the thrift King the decision to use an automatic transmission was purportedly due to the belief that GM didn't have a manual gearbox that would be able to handle the blue flame engine now the car was also designed with three Carter side draft carburetors because why the hell not Robert F McLean crafted the front and back axles the front bulkhead and passenger compartments and a roof line that topped out at just 47 inches keeping everything as close to the ground as Harley Earl intended Earl's original designs suggested a standard steel body construction but over time he began to feel that a more lightweight fiberglass body would offer greater versatility in design even if it didn't provide the same strength not that this would be a concern for long as a high-speed test conducted by GM for its new full-size fiberglass bodied convertible resulted in the test driver rolling the car but escaping the accident unharmed and with virtually no significant damage to the car's body it was settled then that fiberglass would be utilized for the body of the Corvette however for the show model Ellis James Primo utilized reinforced plastic as a means of just getting the car finished on time as the Prototype neared completion the project opal name wouldn't stick GM employees submitted suggestions to the tune of some 300 submissions according to the article origin of the Corvette Name by Michael Satterfield for the gentlemanracer.com but the name that stuck was the one hatched up by assistant director of public relations Mr Myron Scott a GM employee since 1937 and the creator of the All-American Soapbox Derby according to the March 2003 issue of Popular Mechanics Scott fell in love with the word Corvette with a k when he learned it was the British Navy term for quote a small fast armed escort ship Chevrolet Executives liked the name but wanted the K changed to a c and thus the Corvette name was born when the Corvette hit the show floor on January 17 1953 at GM's annual Motorama event in New York City the team involved had every hope that the car would generate Buzz although nobody anticipated the enthusiasm that met the car GM realized they might have something here with this car Harley's team had built so they had 300 manufactured as a test run of sorts it was a hell of a car stylish and unique but it ended up being a lot more expensive than Harley Earl had planned clocking in with an MSRP of roughly three thousand five hundred dollars fifteen hundred dollars more than Harley had intended although production on the Corvette began at an old truck Factory in Flint Michigan it was later moved to St Louis by Year's End in that time the 300 Corvettes produced were all exactly the same aesthetically owing to the Polo white fiberglass body red interior black canvas soft tops and 55 degree raked windshield as the first generation went into production it kept the blue flame engine and the two-speed Powerglide automatic and the Corvette exclusive Carter triple carb the first gen Corvette was occasionally referred to as a solid axle model since independent rear suspension didn't come along until the second gen models according to Mike Mueller's 2003 work classic Corvette 30 years ultimately production was ramped up so that across the 1953 and 1954 model years some 3640 Corvettes were built yet they saw sluggish sales in those first two years perhaps due to these being the only two model years sold without a V8 engine for critics and consumers alike the Corvette was mostly just okay and not really considered comparable to the European sports cars with which Chevy was trying to compete at least according to the October 1954 issue of Popular Mechanics that surveyed Corvette owners many of whom previously owned foreign sports cars and 22 percent of whom rated the Corvette unfavorably in comparison Chief complaint other than the body leaking during excessive rain was that while many liked the car it wasn't viewed as a true sports car in fact the public response was so underwhelming that GM almost considered scrapping the Corvette altogether it'd be the first of many potential deaths for the car with nine lives but a perfect storm of circumstances rescued the car from becoming a footnote in Automotive History thanks to its second patriarch the man to actually hold the title as father of the core fed when the Corvette made its appearance at Motorama in 1953 an important man was in attendance a Belgian immigrant by the name of Zora Arcus duntov born into a Russian Jewish household in 1909 in Belgium duntav was ultimately raised in Berlin and later Leningrad he took an interest in motorcycles as soon as it was possible for him to actually ride one but his mother was so terrified he'd get himself killed that she talked him into driving a car instead on the premise that it was safer not to be deterred in the speed Department duntov bought a race car and zipped through the streets of his hometown with a passion ignited for the career he was to have armed with a degree in mechanical engineering from the charlatan Berg Technological University now the Technical University of Berlin and a resume that included academic research into four-wheel drive and steering Zora Arcus stuntav had his sights set on America and thankfully his resilience allowed him to get there during the midst of the second world war as he was able to evade capture by secluding himself in a French Bordello when he came to the United States in 1940 he founded Arden mechanical with his brother yora developing hemispherical overhead valve aluminum cylinder heads for Ford's flathead V8 now Arcus stuntoff would go back and forth between the U.S and Europe throughout the 1950s as part of his campaign to win Le Mans among other Auto Sports Endeavors but the Crux of his story rests with what he was up to in 1953 you see he was just in time to be in attendance for Motorama and to witness the Prototype Corvette first hand suddenly taken by Harley Earl and his team's creation Zora Arcus stuntav went about talking his way into a job as Maurice Ali's assistant engineer at Chevrolet thanks to his experience in European racing after all if you're going in a more sporty Direction with your product in the years to come you're going to want some people who know a thing or two about competitive performance by the end of 1953 Zora arkestuntov held enough Sway in the company that when the fortunes for the Corvette began to take a downward turn he was able to have his thoughts on the matter heard by Ali himself long story short Arcus duntov seemed to understand the imperative for a manual transmission and more importantly a V8 engine he wrote an Infamous memo directly to Ali on December 16 1953 titled thoughts pertaining to youth hot rodders and Chevrolet in which he discussed the benefits of a V8 engine in making the Corvette more desirable to Young buyers to say nothing of how the hot rodding community in general was an untapped market for Chevrolet noting that quote sports car enthusiasts will get hold of Corvettes and whether we like it or not will race it end quote Arcus duntov saw the potential that the Corvette had to hold the attention of the burgeoning modern car culture and their performance-focused desires so why not craft a car more specifically geared towards those ends this is further bolstered by what I consider to be an even more significant letter he would subsequently send in October 1954. in this letter to Ed Cole and Maury Sally Arcus duntov criticized Chevrolet for the outdated use of the stove bolt 6 and the two-speed Powerglide automatic transmission as well as the internal debate over whether or not to scrap the Corvette altogether titled subject Corvette Arcus duntov writes quote by the looks of it Corvette is on the way out dropping the car will have adverse effects internally and externally it is a mission of failure the failure of aggressive thinking in the eyes of the organization failure to develop a salable product in the eyes of the outside world end quote later in the letter Arcus stuntav would add quote Ford enters the field with the Thunderbird a car of the same class as the Corvette if Ford makes success where we failed it may hurt with aggressiveness of forward publicity they may turn the fact to their advantage I don't mean in terms of Thunderbird sales but in terms of promotion of theirs and depreciation of our general lines we will leave an opening in which they can hit at well Ford out-engineered outsold or ran Chevrolet's pride and joy off the market maybe the idea is far-fetched I can only gauge in terms of my own reactions or actions in the bare-fisted fight we are in now I would hit at any opening I could find and the situation where Ford enters and where Chevrolet Retreats it is not an opening it is a whole now if they can hurt us then we can hurt them we are one year ahead and we possibly learned some lessons which Ford has yet to learn is this effort worthwhile this I am in no position to say Obviously in terms of direct sales a car for the discriminating low volume Market is hardly an efficient investment of efforts the value must be gauged by effects it may have on an overall picture end quote as the letter continues later on Arcus stuntav writes quote the Corvette still has the best and racist look of all the sports cars the Thunderbird included performance is far superior to all the passenger cars and to 99 of the sports cars used on the road it has flaws in respect to passenger protection water leaks and a cumbersome top and side window with these minor flaws removed we have a sports car with as much practical value as the sports car can have end quote in conclusion Arcus stuntav writes quote as I see it and put it down the Corvette is a product different from a passenger automobile having in every phase of operation problems of its own with sales potential between three and at the most ten thousand cars a year it is bound to be a hindering stepchild in an organization which acts and thinks in terms of one million five hundred thousand units a subdivision section department or whatnot but an organization no matter how small but which is directly responsible for the successes of operation is necessary an organization which will eat and leap Corvette as our divisions are eating and sleeping their particular cars I am convinced that a group with concentrated objective will not only stand a chance to achieve the desired result but devise Ways and Means to make the operation profitable in a direct business sense end quote Executives listened and this is why Zora arkestuntov is often credited as having saved the Corvette in its early years earning the title the father of the Corvette despite not being Harley Earl although I guess success has many fathers failure as an orphan blah blah blah I mean you look at a guy like Ed Cole and he was pretty instrumental to the creation of the Corvette in addition to having a pretty hefty Legacy of his own I mean Ed Cole designed the 4.3 liter turbo fire V8 which pumped the Corvette up to 195 horsepower in 1955 the year that also saw the addition of a three-speed manual transmission this was a combination that became a contender on the stock car circuit and it provided similar appeal to enthusiasts who just wanted a good time in a fast car suddenly the Corvette was offering worthy performance and even European racing enthusiasts had cause to take notice in fact act in furtherance of getting people to take the Corvette seriously Arcus duntov put his money where his mouth was getting behind the wheel of a 1956 Corvette powered by a modified V8 and setting a flying mile record at Daytona screaming past 150 miles per hour in the updated machine the modifications included the camshaft design he would use for his own Arden V8s proving the customization potential of the Corvette in addition to its speed and handling capabilities when the Corvette was bumped up to 240 horsepower thanks to the aforementioned 265 cubic inch small block V8 that Ed Cole designed it was paired with the duntov high lift camshaft later Rochester fuel injection was added to the mix and the focus once again was on getting the Corvette onto the track and drumming up publicity by tearing up the circuit stock Corvette won the sports car division while a modified Corvette won the modified sports car division at Daytona Speedweeks in 1956. but the only way to win the big events like Sebring or Le Mans was to create a car specifically for the racetrack this ultimately resulted in the 1957 Corvette Super Sport which debuted at the 1956 New York Auto Show although the super sport did make a record-breaking showing at 12 hours of Sebring it couldn't get the job done at Le Mans due to Mechanical troubles which is bad enough but what made matters worse was the disaster at the 1955 Le Mans race the infamous multi-car crash in which 83 people were killed and some 180 were injured although the incident happened close to two years earlier there was public pressure from American automakers to withdraw from competitive racing so the American automobile manufacturers Association which naturally featured various representatives of American automakers in its membership came to an internal agreement in 1957 that the automakers would not participate or sponsor Motorsports and that included supplying pace cars promoting and offering any type of support whatsoever to racing the American automakers were just out this gentleman's agreement was something of a preventative measure to avoid stricter congressional action by beating the government to the punch and showing that they could self-regulate but this ban essentially killed arkestontov's dreams of pursuing racing with his Creations not that this stopped him from trying to find ways around the agreement such as by providing chassis upgrades and technical assistance to private racing teams hell the Southern Engineering and development company or sedco even put out a detailed guide for racing 1957 Chevrolet stock cars the manual helped prospective Racers build these cars via step-by-step instructions since there could be no on the books Factory support whatsoever for these quote Black Widow Chevys and Arcus stuntov continued his own speed-fueled Pursuits as 1957 saw his promotion to a new role as director of high performance vehicles at Chevrolet to this end he began developing such projects as the Chevrolet engineering research vehicle better known as the serve One racer which he drove at exhibitions on tracks such as the Riverside International Raceway in California But as time wore on the government grew wise to GM's involvement in Motorsports the gentleman's agreement wasn't going to cut it anymore you see anti-monopoly laws prevented GM from owning 60 percent of the U.S car market by 1961 they were already up to 53 due in part to the revenue from the Motorsports in which the company had been quietly involved at the time work was being conducted on a possible mid-engine Corvette which had been years in development Arcus duntov wanted it his colleagues and r d wanted it and he was certain the people wanted it but the justice department was pressuring GM leaving the company little choice but to make the stipulations of the gentleman's agreement mandatory the company couldn't afford to risk it so they shuttered the project for the time being of course this wouldn't be the end of GM's involvement in racing obviously or in racing focused engineering even as the lifespan of the c-1 was winding down consumers still had the option of the Z06 performance package designated the RPO Z06 or regular production option Z06 it was essentially a race-intended Corvette that was ready for the track straight off the line ordering one wasn't typical as you first had to specify that you wanted the fury or fuel injected Coupe specifically with the paws attraction limited slip differential and four-speed manual transmission from there you could order the Z06 option now the only engine you could get was the 5.4 liter l84 with Rochester fuel injection but it was well worth the trouble for any Enthusiast who wanted to get track action in a Corvette only 199 of these original z06s were made but it marked a significant point in Corvette's gradual legitimization in the eyes of sports car Fanatics even after the racing ban by the end of the lifespan of the C1 in 1962 options could get it up to 340 horsepower what had started as a pipe dream was now a legitimate competitor to the European sports cars that held such sway in car culture at the time of course the legend was only just getting started ah yes the stingray the evolution of an American icon arguably as legendary a creation to come out of the mid 60s as the Mustang I'll leave that up to you guys to debate in the comments I mean it's not like we're talking about McLarens here but needless to say its creation was a natural culmination of the ban on Motorsports at Zora Arcus stuntov continued his experiments to craft something in the vein of the super sport or the serve one but what sealed the c2's Fate was the stingray Special by designer and GM r d head Bill Mitchell Mitchell was a Greenville Pennsylvania native who studied at the Carnegie Institute of Technology in Pittsburgh before studying at the Arts students league in New York City after which he joined Baron Collier advertising honing his skills illustrating advertisements for mg Vehicles before becoming friends with the founders of the automobile Racing Club of America Baron Collier Jr miles Collier and Sam Collier Mitchell was hired as the club's illustrator which brought him to the attention of Harley Earl and the rest is history from 1936 to 1958 Mitchell soared through the ranks going from chief designer at Cadillac to director of styling for GM to vice president of all styling taking over from Harley Earl who retired in 1958. since the release of the C1 Harley Earl had become a bit of a controversial figure at GM now some of it stems from a decision he made in 1956 to support his son's racing career by building him a custom Corvette sr2 using members of the GM styling team as well as presumably the company's own money now of course he only did this because his son Jerome was racing a Ferrari and it allegedly bothered some of the higher ups to have the son of the legendary Harley Earl racing in a non-gm car so Harley built the car and he had the ability to get away with this because well he was tarly Earl there was actually a phrase passed around within the Auto industry at the time that went Our Father who art in styling Harley Earl be thy name he wasn't the traditionalist that Henry Ford was and never intended to be hell the whole damsels of design approach proved that with one newspaper proclaiming Earl quote an adventurous man at heart and long an advocate of women's rights in the Auto industry end quote yet this supposedly created tension within the male-dominated industry granted I'm using the timeline from Earl's official website as a guide here so I would imagine there's some bias there but I would argue his impact on the Auto industry is an objective fact that's difficult to dispute whether you consider him the true father of the Corvette or not and we'll talk a little bit more about what happened to Earl post retirement a little later but for now in Mitchell Earl had a successor who was something of a kindred spirit Bill Mitchell was another racing Enthusiast and it was only natural that his Italian influenced performance-oriented Stingray racer utilized a 283 cubic inch small block Chevy V8 with naturally aspirated Rochester constant flow mechanical fuel injection The Hope was to take this car and experiment with mid or rear engine designs sort of like the serve one concept But ultimately the project became more streamlined due to financial and practical necessity and the rear engine model once again became a pipe dream the XP 720 concept aimed to refine the appearance of Mitchell's Stingray while incorporating some of the design elements of the canceled Q Corvette project car such as the independent rear suspension this would end up being the first Corvette to be tested in a wind tunnel for aerodynamics although the fiberglass outer panels from the original Corvette remained GM used double the amount of Steel support for its structure as the previous generation Zora Arcus duntov loved the approach Mitchell took alongside fellow designer Larry Shinoda while the new Corvette would retain the outboard rear brakes Arcus stuntoff fought for the implementation of independent rear suspension which was vital to the overall weight reduction he was going for but production costs were already high and GM were already facing the threat of antitrust lawsuits in the wake of their market dominance a 2012 article by Carl mooth for Global Policy Journal discusses The Dilemma GM was facing and the lengths to which they'd go to keep their company afloat quote historically GM was organized into a vertical hierarchy of Brands a young man might buy a Chevrolet or a Pontiac then move up to an Oldsmobile or a Buick and eventually have a chance to own a Cadillac This was meant to track with the progression of mostly white mostly White Collar careers of men leading one-car households in post-war America and it was a real success through GMAC and its control of its dealer Network GM later made sure GM cars were cheap to finance and difficult to trade in toward Ford products this was achieved by offering artificially High trade-in values for GM products traded toward other GM products however sgm began to worry about antitrust it decided to take evasive action in fact it's set about doing something no other large manufacturing company has done preparing part of the company to be sacrificed on the department of Justice's Anti-Trust altar this brand was Chevrolet throughout the early 1960s Chevrolet began to be differentiated from the rest of GM in unusual ways it had its own high-end sports car the Corvette its own one-ton truck platform the Suburban and seven factories produced exclusively Chevrolet cars engines or parts Chevrolet began to look like a separate car company a Russian doll strategy of a company within a company the strategy allowed GM to push forward owning the market if threatened like a gecko discarding its tail it would throw off Chevrolet as a sacrifice to the Anti-Trust regulators and continue on its path toward world domination or at least that was the strategy end quote wait so you're telling me geckos can discard their tails so why are we still buying insurance from these so in short Chevrolet was already on the chopping block if push came to shove with the government and so they were especially risk-averse but Arcus duntov was able to convince the company to take the risk on The Vow that his second generation Corvette would sell some thirty thousand units in its first year however while Arcus dontoff fought for the independent rear suspension Mitchell fought to keep the split rear window which remained but only for the first year of production so compromise I guess yet the car itself was so visually striking in every other regard that it couldn't help but centralize all attention what would the eye-catching Body Lines and a hood with vents that lacked functionality but still looked cool as hell so everything worked out for the better anyhow but beyond that the performance featured a considerable power upgrade with optional hydraulic power steering and 327 cubic inch V8 engine options that started at a 250 horsepower base but could get drivers north of 300 horsepower depending on the options selected for instance the Rochester fuel injected 327 V8 could get you up to 360 horsepower from the jump the interior design was remodeled as well with a more streamlined Dash a roomier glove box and ventilation improvements in addition to more visually pleasing rounded gauges along with a sleeker center console and vertically aligned radio of course there were criticisms regarding the lack of a rear deck or trunk lid and I've read plenty of rumors online about why this was the case from accommodating weight reduction while maintaining the front mid-engine rear wheel drive layout to Zora Arcus stuntav being told by GM that they only had the funds for either the independent rear suspension or a proper trunk lid but not both either way this is how it ended up take it or leave it and to be fair there was still storage space it was just an issue regarding ease of access as the driver would have to undo the folded top panel opening to get to the storage area ultimately it was a relatively small issue in the grand scheme of things because when the Corvette Stingray hit the market in 1963 the reaction was genuinely enthusiastic current driver proclaimed quote hiding independent rear suspension under its sculptured tail the Corvette is now second to no other production sports car in road holding and is still the most powerful end quote the review did note issues with understeer and an overall setup more conducive to the track than back road driving owing perhaps to what the review claimed was quote a rigid front anti-roll bar in combination with a relatively stiff transverse leaf spring in the rear end quote and the review follows up that statement by saying that this hampered quote the independence of the suspension of each wheel with the result that even on mildly rough surfaces the car does not feel perfectly stable end quote but it was an otherwise solid review for a car looking to further stake its claim in the evolving American sports car market of course there's always been that debate surrounding the stingray name from what I could find the stingray name came when Mitchell wanted to start racing his xp-87 concept he was prohibited from calling it a Corvette so he needed to find a new name Mitchell was big into deep sea fishing and wanted his car to evoke the stingray and so he used it as a single word much like the fish but when GM purchased the car from Mitchell in 1961 one word became two and that title was retroactively applied to Mitchell's Stingray racer inevitably the 1963 production Corvette Stingray was written as two words and would stick around for the production cycle of the C2 Corvette from 1963 to 1967 before going back to one word from 1969 to 1976. I don't know how much this debate actually matters to anybody but it's something I've always wondered about that I never really had the drive or excuse to research before so there you go and once it was on the market the 1963 C2 was one for the ages Chevrolet's ad slogan declared quote only a man with a Heart of Stone could withstand Temptation like this end quote Carr may have sold below arkestontov's projections moving some 21 513 units in its first year but it proved the viability of the Corvette moving forward the notion that enthusiasts would actually purchase an Enthusiast car which I'm sure the market would love these days and it set the tone somewhat for Corvette's future under Bill Mitchell as evidenced by his mako shark concept cars a creation in tandem with Larry Shinoda born of Mitchell's enthusiasm over having supposedly caught a shark on one of his fishing Expeditions the Mako Shark made its debut at the 1962 New York International Auto Show which more or less tells you the purpose of the car as it made the rounds at various Automotive Expos to give people a sense of where the Corvette might be headed for the future and to test public response accordingly granted the design would change over time through the removal of the double bubble canopy and the redesign of the hood and front fascia but it remained an incredibly alluring vehicle so much so that GM used it as the base for what would later become the manta ray utilizing a new ZL1 all-aluminum 427 engine the Mako 2 concept served a similar purpose as a sort of test run for future designs in this case a look into what the future might hold for the C3 's engineering director Frank Winchell headed a development team to explore different possibilities for the Next Generation while Zora Arcus stuntov was in charge of another in the desire to design a proper mid or rear engine Corvette Winchell looked to the Chevy Corvair from small block Chevy V8 Creator Ed Cole from this starting point Winchell's team devised a smaller version of the Corvair with a rear aligned 327 cubic inch V8 and a transaxle reminiscent of the Pontiac Tempest but the car was too heavy and unwieldy leading to its destruction during a high-speed Lane change test and duntov's team didn't fare much better focusing on mid-engine possibilities only to come to the realization that GM didn't have a transaxle capable of handling the torque of a high power V8 so Mitchell got in on the fun and gave a redesign his shot alongside Larry Shinoda Mitchell's take had something of a coke bottle design with a sharper front end in keeping with the aggression of the first mako shark but on a chassis that would be more of an adaptation of the existing stingrays design Mitchell again took shinoda's designs to The Styling Department giving us what would become the Mako 2 which hit the auto show circuit in October 1965. however the design was still divisive enough to prompt further redesigning before the team could settle on a direction for the C3 now with all that having been said the C2 still had plenty of life left before it was phased out for instance 1965 brought the 396 cubic inch big block engine that made 425 horsepower while 1966 brought further big block options in the form of the 396 and the 427 the latter of which could get you 435 horsepower and 460 torque meanwhile 1967 brought the infamous l88-427 a racing designed Engine with forged pistons and an overall vehicle layout that included positraction differential reinforced suspension and power brakes the C2 is the only Corvette generation left for us to review as of the making of this video well other than the C8 but how are we going to get one of those here's hoping we can get our hands on a C2 to experience for ourselves but for now we press on as the third generation would bring great gains and greater losses when the C3 debuted for model year 1968 it was a new car that had a hint of familiarity for anyone who'd seen the Mako 2 on the car show rounds granted it wasn't as Fierce looking but it didn't really have to be as long as it Advanced the standard of performance that the team wanted to reflect with each new Corvette generation the C3 got an automatic transmission in the form of a three-speed Turbo hydramatic with an optional three or four speed manual you could get the 327 cubic inch small block with 300 horsepower standard or you could get 350 horsepower with the l-79 variant and that's great and all if you're big on figures and potential but the car almost instantly started getting criticisms over build quality from poorly fitted body panels to below standard factory paint but this is almost something of a theme for the Corvette in the early years underwhelming early reviews leading way to improvements that actualize the model's potential which gained the car a dedicated following with the C3 Corvette we got the beefier big block 427 ovens such as the 390 horsepower l-36 mb435 horsepower l71 there was also the much sought after L88 Big Blocks which got you a bigger engine accommodating Hood bulge so you could really let everybody know you were packing heat hell even the small blocks got in on it by 1969 when they were bumped up to 350 cubic inches yet challenges were ahead owing to an internal struggle at GM that inadvertently aided the production of the 1970 model if you can believe it you see the United Automobile workers went on strike for 67 days in 1970 which prompted GM to extend the 1969 production year by two months not only did this lead to a record sales year Chevrolet President John DeLorean felt that extending production on the 1969 model year would allow the company to catch up on the manufacturing backlog caused by the strike the Corvette that rolled off the production line on November 7 1969 would have been a 1970 model if not for the strike but regardless the Riverside gold painted car holds the distinction of being the 250th Corvette produced the strike was ultimately resolved with wage increases inflation protection and the ability to retire and take pension after 30 years and with the strike resolved everyone went back to work albeit in a decade that proved challenging to the Auto industry due to government stipulations yet even as we entered the age of tightening emissions regulations people were still excited to drive the C3 granted by 1971 the LT1 engine had declined from 370 to 330 horsepower but it was still arguably the best handling of the C3 options because of the reduced weight over the nose the LT1 had been an engine option utilized in racing and it preceded the introduction of bigger options like the 454 cubic inch LS6 making 425 horsepower in addition to the ZR1 and ZR2 racing packages which got you suspension upgrades among other changes over time the loyalty to the C2 dissipated somewhat as people grew to appreciate a C3 in 1975 the C3 went through some even bigger changes on the one hand it received a catalytic converter and new ignition and fuel tank emission control systems on the other hand it lost those big block engine options 1975 was also the start of the 11-year Hiatus for convertible models 1976 offered aluminum wheels but lost the sugar scoop but the Corvette's popularity grew throughout the decade in spite of inflating prices with over 130 000 units sold between 1975 and 1977. the Corvette's third generation marked a turning point for the brand as well as a Changing of the Guard Zora Arcus duntov retired in 1975 to be succeeded as Corvette's chief engineer by Dave McClellan who joined GM in 1959 following his graduation from Wayne State University yet despite the change in leadership the decade saw Corvette surpassed 50 000 production units in a single year for 1979 reaching 53 807 units making it the highest selling year in the history of the Corvette up to that point this despite a price tag of over ten thousand dollars on most models which is over thirty five thousand dollars in 2020 which I guess doesn't sound that bad depending on what it is you're looking for but the United States was still recovering from the recession of 1973 to 1975 so it was impressive not only that the brand was able to recover but that so many people decided to purchase Corvettes over more fuel conscious cheaper import offerings that were beginning to take hold at the time so while the Arab Oil Embargo had everyone worried about fuel consumption and gas prices which went hand in hand with the decline of the bigger is better mentality in American automotives there remained a clear market for what the Corvette was offering and share Chevrolet intended to keep the brand strong heading into the 1980s in 1981 production moved from the Corvette assembly plant in St Louis to a new plant in Bowling Green Kentucky Home of the future National Corvette Museum C3 soldiered on into the 80s with the same Sleek look but somewhat softer with a more rounded appearance and lighter materials which was cool but unfortunately a government mandated 85 mile per hour speedometer was added which was bad enough if you were looking to get going on the track but if you were living in California it was even worse since state emission laws restricted displacement to the 305 cubic inch V8 and an automatic transmission for 1980 which itself isn't the end of the world but when there were so many other engine options it was understandable that people felt throttled and while 1981 brought a computer-control command feature to help control ignition timing and air fuel mixture as a way of reducing emissions the C3 was stuck with automatic transmissions for its final year in 1982 but there was at least more power on offer in the form of the fuel-injected 350 cubic inch l83 V8 making 200 horsepower in addition to a redesigned exhaust system and an in-tank electric fuel pump but excitement was cooling for the Corvette production numbers declined to 25 407 units yet it wouldn't be the end of the Corvette oh wait what it was well it was and it wasn't as the Corvette ended up taking a year off a good story for another time oh that freaking line but for now we come to the dusk of the Corvette's early years you know for a video ostensibly about Harley Earl and the early history of the Corvette he's been strangely absent for a sizable chunk of this video and that reason is obviously that he retired in 1958 and yet that wasn't the end of his story you see when Harley Earl retired his final project involved overseeing designs on the 1960 to 1962 models of the Corvette You could argue that he had more to offer but upon turning 65 Harley had reached GM's mandatory retirement age never mind that by the time he walked out the door GM had become one of the world's largest corporations off the back of his philosophies like utilizing Auto design over performance to drive sales or the whole planned obsolescence ideology in 1960 Harley took on the role of second ever Commissioner of NASCAR and yeah the position was mostly an honorary title with no power but that would change over the decades that followed and yes he only really got the title because he was friends with the first commissioner Big Bill France unrelated to Big Bill hell but the commissioner role was also a way of rewarding certain figures for their contributions to racing Harley would main commissioner for just nine years the second shortest tenure for a commissioner but regardless of the duration of his tenure Harley's Legend status is evident by the fact that the Harley J Earl trophy is still awarded each year to the winner of the Daytona 500. so the respect for him didn't end at General Motors on the subject of General Motors this period marked the passing of the brothers who'd helped Harley get his start in the company of the Seven Brothers who ran Fisher body all but one had died before 1972. among them were Harley's friends Lawrence P Fisher who passed away in 1961. and Alfred J Fisher who passed away two short years later in a way it felt like the end of an era as the automotive world was moving towards new ideas and fresh faces to Usher them in although this does nothing to diminish the contributions of those who paved those well-worn paths on April 10 1969 the world lost Harley Jefferson Earl to a stroke at the age of 75. yet he was far from forgotten in the years that followed in addition to the aforementioned Harley J Earl trophy first awarded in 1959 Earl was posthumously inducted into the automotive Hall of Fame in 1986. in 1999 in a list by the Detroit Free Press ranking Michigan's 100 greatest artists and entertainers of the 20th century Earl was third behind only Aretha Franklin and Stevie Wonder HIS Automotive Hall of Fame induction serves as a eulogy to Harley Earl's accomplishments and a primer on why he's remembered to this day quote the achievements during Harley Earl's tenure as GM's head of design could fill a book he introduced clay modeling to The Design Studios the concept of the annual model change called Dynamic obsolescence was pioneered concept cars like the Buick y job were introduced a review of noteworthy cards created during his tenure fills of a book on its own of all the firsts the most important was the legitimizing of the role of design and the designer end quote Harley Earl was ahead of his time and he brought cars ahead of theirs more than anything this is his legacy for The Domestic Auto industry Harley Earl designed the future shaping a path he would live to see paved but never tread then such is the business of innovators with the retirement of Zora arcus duntov and the death of Harley Earl we had a Changing of the Guard when it came to the custodians of the Corvette's Legacy not that Chevy seemed all that eager to Usher the C3 out the door since it was the most successful generation of the Corvette up to that point even in spite of the 70s oil crisis leading to the rise of smaller more fuel-efficient cars and as the Corvette entered the 1980s we saw a mission control systems gain more widespread usage with the 1981 C3 offering computer control command to regulate air fuel mixture and ignition timing 1982 brought a remodeled exhaust system and in-tank electric fuel pump which is great but enthusiasts bristled at this standard automatic transmission these late models were stuck with things could have been better but they also could have been a whole hell of a lot worse and yet with the Corvette in the 1980s you would think we'd get a full-scale push for a greater technological advancement and we did but on a bit of a delay you see with the intended departure of the C3 in 1982 it was expected we'd get an imminent announcement on the Next Generation but some unexpected events led to something no one could have anticipated for the 30th anniversary year of one of the most important American cars ever made there would be nothing to show nothing released so let's dive in and explore a curious footnote in Automotive History as 1983 became the year without a Corvette chief engineer Dave McClellan had been working on the C4 with lead designer Jerry Palmer since September 1978. the C4 was initially planned to release for model year 1982 but like an average RCR story it got delayed because of the outsized Ambitions of the person making it upgrades and ideas that Chevrolet wanted to implement and test meant that the car would release in the fall of 1982 for model year 1983. yet that didn't exactly happen either one of the issues with the development of the C4 was the amount of planning time necessary to bring it to life normally you'd want to plan everything out in advance and extensively at that so that you work out all the Kinks early and can get a fully formed satisfying product out as soon as possible because you can't really approach car development the way George R.R Martin approaches writing a novel sometimes it helps to be a gardener who lets things develop organically but sometimes you just have to be an architect and start laying down structure so you can get the damn ball rolling however the C4 took more time than usual because it sat at the intersection of these two philosophies a car that had to be extensively planned out yet also serve as an organic reaction to the period in which it was developed let me explain one of the Legends surrounding the development process is that the team needed more time to re-engineer the powertrain for the C4 since the initial design didn't take into account the belt tightening emissions regulations particularly with regards to California with state emissions laws suddenly restricting displacement to the 305 cubic inch V8 in the early 1980s not the end of the world but the best way to get people wanting more and rebelling against regulations is to tell them that no you can't have more and also these are the regulations and you'd better follow them to the letter or else but was that really the cause of the c4's delay corfsport.com writer Josh Boyd offered an explanation in his article the car that never should have been the story of the 1983 Corvette he writes quote perhaps the most widely believed theory for this mysterious delay comes from Tales of a late insistence by former GM General Manager Lloyd Roos to dump a previously planned T-top design in favor of a Target style top this last second design change was said to have caused a lack of structural rigidity this required a complete Redevelopment of the c4's frame rails to offset this change and ultimately consumed an excessive amount of time what had become certain during the lengthy design process of the C4 was that delay in the intended late 1982 release date was imminent posed with the question of how best to confront this issue GM execs decided to forego the 1983 production year in its entirety instead focusing on the c4's release as an early 1984 model as a result no true production run of 1983 Corvettes was ever built end quote and that my friends is how 1983 ended up being the year without a Corvette and yet there's always a caveat to every never in this case while a proper 1983 production Corvette was never built for distribution GM still had 43 pilot cars produced for research and testing at their Bowling Green Kentucky assembly plant naturally these cars were scheduled for destruction after they'd served their purposes and the majority of them were destroyed but one managed to survive to make a long story short the surviving 1983 Corvette was transported from Bowling Green to the GM Milford Proving Grounds where it served its function as a research prototype assigned the ID number rbv098 the car and its Brethren were instrumental in the development of the C4 so when it was returned to the Bowling Green assembly plant it's rumored that some sentimental workers decided to rescue rbv-098 from destruction after all this was the 30th Anniversary Corvette For Better or Worse sure it wasn't a production model but this was the only birthday cake the Corvette was going to get for its big 3-0 so the workers allegedly secreted the car out of the assembly plant and kept it hidden under a car cover at an undisclosed location inside the facility the plan was to keep it from being destroyed and then cutting a deal later with GM to ensure its preservation perhaps by buying the Prototype off of GM outright or making the argument for the historicity of the model you know the whole argument of it's the only one of its kind and we got to save it for future generations of the future Generations could know when and you know it's something where there aren't always people who are thinking about history in the manufacturing of something but either way these GM employees had a plan that they put into action because it's better to ask forgiveness than to ask for permission but another Legend tells a very different story for The Gap year Corvette's rescue you see in 1983 the quality manager of the Bowling Green assembly plant was a man by the name of Ralph Monteleone it was his job to make sure that each of the Prototype Corvettes was destroyed I mean an on-site Crusher was even transported to the plant by GM for this exact purpose but on the day the crusher was brought to the plant a nasty storm rolled in with it Monteleone who'd just bought a fancy new pair of cowboy boots didn't want to go wading through puddles in the nicest pair of shoes a 1983 Automotive assembly plant had ever seen so he ordered a stay of execution for rbv-098 except by the next day GM had taken the crusher back having assumed all the models had been destroyed Monteleone didn't know about it until it was too late and suddenly he had a 1983 Corvette sitting on his lot with no way to destroy it so he parked it in back through a car cover over it and just sort of left it there when monteleone's successor Paul schnoz took over in 1984 he asked what the deal was with the random Corvette sitting in back when he was told the story of Monteleone and The Telltale cowboy boots schnoz realized just what he had on his hands before long the Bowling Green assembly negotiated official ownership of rbv-098 from GM that 1983 Corvette remained on display at the plant until 1994 when it took up Residence at the National Corvette Museum nearby a cute story all things considered of course only Monteleone could verify the truth of it and luckily he did in a rare interview with Corvette online for LSX magazine Ralph Monteleone stated that these test Corvettes were quote validation vehicles or cars in the final step before production but because they were built with parts intended for production each 1983 Corvette had a VIN plate however this didn't actually mean they were suitable for sale they had all sorts of problems from body fit issues to inadequate Emissions Control Systems it's only natural that people would wonder why you'd want to send a car with such clear future historical significance as a 1983 Corvette to the scrap Heap but in the context of monteleone's comments it makes all the sense in the world why GM would want these cars destroyed as he noted the engines on those validation Vehicles were notoriously underpowered due to the incompatibility between the small block Chevy V8s and the crossfire injection in addition to the aforementioned problems there were also issues with the instrument panel and electronics and Lord only knows what else by monteleone's own admission destroying validation Vehicles was basically the industry standard so what incentive would there have been to risk one's career just to save one car what sense would that have made well to put it bluntly none it wouldn't have made any sense the final season of dark would have made more sense but it begs the question if the car's rescue wasn't intentional how is the car saved is the legend of monteleone's cowboy boots true as it turns out yes yes it is but it's only part of the story while Monteleone confirmed the truth of the legend he would add that he doesn't know why GM never followed up on the vehicle's Vin plates since one would assume if the company was really so militant about seeing every validation vehicle destroyed they would have checked all the VIN plate numbers and noticed one car was missing as Monteleone States quote I had all intentions to follow up and make certain that all vehicles were gone I had already made sure that the paperwork was complete on all the others and pulled from the vehicles that we had on site we brought in all the other 1983s and used a die grinder to cut the windshield and remove the VIN plates and then turn them into the finance department next we took them to the car crusher on site at the time but the darn rain hit so hard and that last white 83 vet was sitting out in about three inches of water the parking lot held a lot of water during rain so I figured as soon as it stopped and the water went down I could go out I did get it moved to another location which made some think they were all destroyed thing is I had on this pair of brand new out of the box cowboy boots which cost two hundred dollars and that was a lot of money in 1983 at least for me somewhere along the way word spread that all vehicles were gone Finance I guess did not count the VIN plates and figured they had them all in the manila folder they were in and the car crusher had wrapped up their equipment you would have thought they would have asked about vehicle plates but I can't answer why they didn't end quote and so there you have it the 1983 Corvette made it through the year without a Corvette basically on a fluke for what it's worth Monteleone is an interesting guy in his own right he first joined GM as part of the St Louis Corvette plant in 1968 in a part-time summer job as an end-of-line inspector but before long he was taking newly manufactured Corvettes onto the test track for an 18 year old Auto Enthusiast dude was pretty much living the dream you could argue that by the time he took over as quality manager of the Bowling Green assembly plant in the 1980s there was no one better qualified to do the job given how long he'd been with GM by that point and how many fresh off the line Corvettes he'd driven and he offered a common sense ideology that lined up with GM's approach to validation Vehicles since no one is really thinking about preserving test models for posterity as Monteleone says quote where would you stop why would you save them what would you do with them they did save many of the concept show vehicles but most of those went to the shredder not one single person said hey these are 1983 Vehicles we better keep one someone might want to see it the truth is we did not want people to see the poor quality the instructions given to me were make them all go away there is a formal General Motors procedure to make that happen end quote and that's exactly what did happen save for rbv098 the Ultimate Survivor a car that escaped the crusher avoided being forgotten in the waterlogged and narrows of the Bowling Green plan and later survived the infamous 2014 Sky Dome sinkhole collapse at the National Corvette Museum countless iconic Corvettes lost yet the sole 1983 model was not among the casualties rbv098 miraculously endured once again illustrating that a good car can be as hard to kill as it can be defined but as the year without a Corvette wound down the height behind the C4 would only grow now given the title of this video you could technically stop it here because we've already covered The Year Without a Corvette but its implications created sort of waves that went on into the C4 generation because if you're going to take that much time to get a vehicle right then damn it when it rolls out it better be right now one could argue that GM had enough of a car to work off of that they might have been able to release a C4 in 1983 after all but Monteleone disagrees making a point of stating how bad First Impressions have killed such cars as the Edsel and the Aztec sure the Edsel wasn't a pre-existing model with a Heritage to it and the Aztec is like 17 whole last years after the period we're talking about now but the point remains people were already looking for reasons to get out of the Corvette business not just consumers but GM Executives as well you'd think for a car that had gone so far out of its way to prove itself the Corvette wouldn't have constantly found itself in danger of being shelved you get like the shortest guy on a basketball team the Corvette was constantly having to earn its spot so McClellan and his team really had to stick the landing on the launch of the C4 they saw the date for the model year change knew they wouldn't make it and adjusted accordingly it was just common sense business monthly owned even reflects on this stating quote in the automotive manufacturing world as you know model year changes have been pretty standard the July August time is pretty much a written rule or it was in those days for when the next model year is released actually some Corvette owners think they have a 1983 model year vehicle versus the 1984 that they actually have title to in some cases they do not understand that timing they see manufacture date 1983 on the certification labels on the door face and think they have a 1983 but it was a 1984. after sitting through many meetings filled with very high daily doses of stress from Reading product reviews and realizing how many issues that the vehicle had this unpopular decision was made if that major model change failed it could have been the death of the Corvette end quote the ambition with the C4 was to not just stand Toe to Toe with the Ferraris and Porsches of the world but to surpass them Chevy just needed more time to implement their changes however this meant the C3 would live on for an extra year while Engineers tried to figure out how to fully realize this car they had been designing since the late 70s you had a car with a different chassis than the C3 with bumpers and body panels that ditched fiberglass in favor of molding Plastics the car would feature other significant departures from Models past as Auto list explains in their history of the C4 Corvette quote unlike the body on frame construction of earlier Corvettes the C4 was built with a uniframe not to be confused with a unibody assembly in which the exterior body panels are structural members the uniframe combines critical elements of the car such as the windshield frame into one welded unit end quote it was a departure from the Zora Arcus stuntav era as the C4 fastback coupe was not only the first production Corvette with a glass hatchback it also offered a clear acrylic removable roof panel option if you didn't want the Standard fiberglass the C4 also steered into the ever-growing futurism of the 1980s super chevy.com author Brian Brennan details this in his article Corvette's forgotten high-tech dashboard C4 electronic Liquid Crystal quote the belated 83 Corvette now the 84 was the first automobile to offer an electronic instrument cluster with three separate Liquid Crystal displays as standard equipment it was manufactured by the AC spark plug division of General Motors it was used in Corvettes from 1984 to 88. it is based on the microprocessor-based LCD cluster that displayed speed fuel and RPM instantly the speedo and Tack along with the speed and RPM are presented in digital form as well as in an analog graph that changes colors from green to Yellow to red as you climb the Rev range along with this the center section that is displayed directly over the steering column is called the driver information center and is equipped with analog fuel level display and four multi-function digital displays that are displayed at your will actually at the flip of a switch allowing for eight separate digital readouts they break out into oil pressure slash temperature coolant temperature slash voltage instant slash average fuel economy and trip odometer slash range slash distance traveled on reserve fuel end quote naturally the article goes on to detail the Litany of problems consumers ran into with these units in the years ahead such as intermittent lighting failures or instrument panels that went dark altogether Even in our review of the C4 Mr regular describes it as a rainbow once the instrument cluster suffers any sun damage since the colors all sort of just blend together but the c4's technological leaps were more notable than just what was done with the dash McClellan wanted to get away from the lateral movement of the c3's design something that was clearly a Corvette but also an artistic statement in its own right in addition to the electronic dashboard and displays the C4 offered all independent lightweight suspension aluminum calipers for the brakes and light transverse fiberglass monoleaf Springs to replace the coils of the previous generation and all coming together to create a car that was more aerodynamic owing to a height sitting 8.5 inches shorter than the C3 and a wheelbase decreased by two inches it was shorter lighter and yet still wider so people complaining about storage space had a little more to work with as far as transmission options it was pretty much the four-speed automatic unless you took the option only offered in the first four years of the C4 the Doug Nash 4 plus 3 transmission which took a four-speed manual paired with an automatic overdrive on the top three gears granted power wasn't a blow away on the 5.7 liter small block V8 engine options but that wouldn't be as big of a detractor for some as long as the car made up the difference in handling and ride quality and as time went on the 250 horsepower performance of the l98 fell by the wayside in the wake of the second generation Chevy LT1 small block which boosted the C4 to 300 horsepower overall the C4 was a critical success as Car and Driver raved about the 0-60 acceleration and its 140 mile per hour top speed quote the Corvette is a truly Stout automobile it is all that the fevered acolytes so desperately wanted their fiberglass fossil to be a true born world-class sports car loaded with technical sophistication end quote Motor Trend proudly declared it the car of the year for 1984 and it was a commercial success as well selling some 51 547 units in 1984 alone at a price tag of around 21 800 dollars and over the years the improvements continued with a fairly rapid progression like the l83 V8 being ditched in 1985 in favor of the l98 that shared the tuned Point fuel injection of the Chevy Camaro for 1986 marking the return of the convertible the introduction of anti-lock brakes electronic climate control and a third brake light or 1987 offering roller hydraulic lifters and a B2K twin turbo engine conversion that could boost output to 345 horsepower and 465 torque this ties into Chevrolet's aim with the evolution of the C4 they wanted to make the world's fastest production car and so they Enlisted the aid of UK engineering consulting company group Lotus to build the zr-1 which debuted in 1990 as an optional performance package it went from 0 to 60 in 4.6 seconds with top speeds of 175 miles per hour on the strength of 8 lt5 engine which made in the ballpark of around 375 brake horsepower Chevrolet had a goal and that's exactly what they achieved with this ZR1 on March 1st 1990 at the test track at Fort Stockton Texas the ZR1 broke several World Records the numbers which were verified by the FIA included 24-hour world speed endurance runs of 5 000 kilometers at 175.710 miles per hour 5 000 miles at 173.7 miles per hour and 4221 miles at 175.885 miles per hour naturally having achieved their goal GM had to sell the ZR1 package at a cost commensurate with its technical accomplishments at a price tag of 59 000 which is equivalent to around 137 207 today it was the most expensive Corvette ever at the time it sold roughly 3 000 units in its first year as the package she was hurt by the same things the C3 was able to succeed in spite of you see once again the U.S was in the midst of a recession this time as the result of factors like the excessive debt accumulation of the 80s and the oil price shock of 1990. throughout the 90s C4 is generally hovered between 20 000 and 23 000 units in sales peaking in 1994 with 23 330 units sold but then again you know the gears in between saw Milestones such as the millionth Corvette to come off the factory line in 1992 the 40th anniversary C4 in 1993 a symbolic belated birthday for the brand which skipped its 30th and there was also the addition of mass airflow sequential fuel injection to the LT1 engine in 1994. some modest restylings in 1995 and the end of the c4's production cycle in 1996 with the introduction of the OBD2 diagnostic system to the fleet as well as the Corvette Grand Sport based on the 19 63 model of the same name and the 96 Collector's Edition in Sebring silver the Corvette C4 might not have sold the way GM might have hoped but it represented the biggest Leap Forward the Corvette had yet seen Paving the way for the Corvette's contemporary identity it truly connected the various periods between the eras of Harley Earl Zora ARCA stuntal Bill Mitchell Larry Shinoda you know it brought that modern look performance and character that's come to be associated with the Corvette in the last 25 years or so and yet because there's always an end yet while the mid-90s marked the end of the C4 they signaled the departure of a man regarded as the savior of the Corvette because it may take a village to bring a car to life but sometimes it only takes one man to save it from its millionth date with the proverbial Crusher all right so let me back up a bit you see Jim Perkins was a Chevy executive who took a proactive approach in virtually every aspect of his career it all started in 1960 after he graduated from Baylor University a Texas native Perkins shared more than a bit in common with Ralph Monteleone in that Perkins also fancied a fine pair of cowboy boots and a bit of professional gumption he tried to get an interview at the Chevrolet office in Dallas but was rebuffed at every turn yet he refused to give up in an approach I'm not sure would work today and I'm kind of surprised work demon then Perkins basically just spent the entire day approaching people in the lobby talking to anyone who would hear him out and eventually it worked he was able to smooth talk his way into a warehouse job that amounted to disposing of defective parts that had been returned under warranty not as glamorous as monteleone's job but you got to start somewhere you know and once he got started man he got started Perkins was beneficiary to one of the most meteoric rises in Corporate America at the time or at least that I know of getting out of the warehouse and into a sales position where he excelled to such an extent that he quickly found himself weaving his way through senior sales into an executive position maintaining his high standing through a combination of ambition charm and knowledge of the ins and outs of the Auto industry within 20 years from soliciting an interview in the lobby of a regional Chevrolet office as a kid who was fresh out of college Perkins was the general manager of the entire friggin company which is why it's so surprising that he would then peace out within the five years that followed as Toyota made him an offer he couldn't refuse under Toyota he was placed in charge of launching the Lexus brand in 1989 and it was a fairly prestigious gig considering what the brand would end up becoming yet there was a personal attachment to Chevrolet for Perkins beyond the fact that they'd given him a start in the Auto industry Street he'd grown up loving Chevys in his youth which is why he even applied at the regional office in Dallas in the first place coming straight out of college one would think he had options but he wanted to work at Chevrolet and that's what he did see the dream be the dream I guess now you would think having left Chevrolet after being promoted to regional manager would have soured his reputation in the Auto industry but that wasn't really the case not even when he left Toyota within five years of leaving Chevrolet in order to return to Chevrolet as general manager I mean talk about gutsy and yeah they took him back he was Jim Perkins maybe he wasn't universally loved but he was trusted to get things done whether it was in sales or in helping launch worldwide Brands so he was back in a top position and not a moment too soon basically by this point sales of Chevy's Fleet were taking a hit at least relative to the competition those sales numbers I listed earlier for the C4 in the 90s hovering around 21 to 23 000 units yeah those numbers weren't good by GM standards to the extent that GM wanted the Corvette scrapped altogether declaring it a non-essential part of their Fleet it goes back to that argument I see online all the time about how automakers don't really manufacture Enthusiast cars for the mass Market anymore well it's not a new argument really because even then automakers were bristling against the idea of investing in these athletic vigorously handling High trim package offerings because well they weren't profitable they were expensive to make and people weren't buying enough of them to justify the expense and even though the Corvette had roughly 40 Years of history behind it by then history doesn't mean a damn thing if the prestige that's supposed to come with the lineage adds nothing to the bottom line so General Motors intended for the Corvette to go the way of the Corvair and the El Camino and wait how many times it is it now that they've almost killed the Corvette I'm losing track you know that was the plan until Jim Perkins Jim Perkins stepped in to work his Texas Magic let's expand on this uh basically Ralph Kramer was the director of public relations for Chevrolet during Perkins tenure and he recalled the Texans Ingenuity in getting the C5 off the ground in an interview with Automotive news quote it was Perkins who found the money to go ahead and get the prototypes built if it wasn't for that that car was destined to be shelved he had the opportunity to move some funds around and he did that surreptitiously causing no end of Anguish among the auditors end quote but how was this put on Perkins radar in the first place Joel Spielman who headed up the midsize car division was horrified at the possibility of losing the Corvette he knew Perkins was as big an Enthusiast as he himself was and so he reached out for help Perkins apparently met with GM president Lloyd Roos and a 2018 article by Gary whitsonburg of car and driver gets into the specifics quote Perkins met with GM president Lloyd Roos who told him we need the capital and engineering resources to do the new full-size sedan platform so we can't do Corvette the resources instead went toward the 1992-199 Pontiac Bonneville Buick LeSabre and Oldsmobile 88. not exactly a murderer's row that Spielman then asked Russ McLean director of manufacturing for GM in Mexico to return to the states to save the Corvette McLean's responsibilities as a platform manager were similar to those of GM's current vehicle line Executives known as vles and included product engineering manufacturing slash plant engineering purchasing Quality Service Parts and finance when I took over in February 1992 McLean told Car and Driver the C5 program was not approved we were at the bottom of the Heap on quality and customer satisfaction and were losing a significant amount of money on each car built mcclellan's team was already working on revolutionary replacement for the Aging C4 with a longer wheelbase a rear-mounted transaxle and a much stiffer backbone structure to keep that work funded and on track Perkins Clan Destiny tapped his Chevrolet marketing budget Jim came up with a million dollars out of his advertising budget Spielman says and I looked across the rest of my organization and found half a million here a hundred thousand there and put enough together to build a working mule with a new structure under the old car end quote so they made a prototype C5 out of a hydroformed backbone and a rear transaxle shoved onto a C4 body Perkins continued working alongside Spielman and Dave Hill who had taken over from Dave McClellan as Corvette's chief engineer in 1992 to get members of the North American strategy board to experience the mule car they had built Perkins then had his guys add up all the magazine covers the Corvette had gotten in its lifetime a number exceeding 800 it laid the foundation of Perkins argument that the Corvette was quote an American icon that they had no right to cancel end quote Perkins completed a proposal and other documentation such as sales projections that were some 250 percent better than the C4 and so he was approved and Russ McLean's team got to work on the C5 when the car launched in 1997 it kicked off a trend of Corvette's never dipping below 32 000 in units per year in sales in the decade that followed and with good reason although the fifth generation marked A New Beginning for the Corvette and with its significant changes these changes still manage to maintain the spirit of the car as enthusiasts had come to know it from Chris teague's article for auto list C5 Corvette the complete reference facts and history quote the Corvette c5's chassis was completely redesigned from previous versions of the car the previous multi-piece welded frame was replaced with a one-piece hydroform chassis with a composite Balsa core floor and cast aluminum windshield frame that added a great deal of rigidity it was so stiff that no extra supports had to be added to make the convertible handle well the C5 was produced and sold for most of its lifespan with few changes to the fundamentals of the car the engine became more powerful more options packages were offered and there were cosmetic updates but the car did not change significantly despite the engine's large displacement and power the Corvette C5 achieved decent fuel economy numbers 18 miles per gallon City and 25 miles per gallon highway with the automatic transmission those ratings helped the C5 avoid the gas guzzler attacks that many other vehicles in the class are faced with the Corvette c5's low curb weight of under 3 300 pounds and the low drag coefficient are thanked for boosting the car's fuel economy and for making it the most fuel-efficient Corvette yet end quote the C5 saw production numbers hit nearly a quarter million making it among the more commonplace Corvettes you can find but that doesn't mean there weren't unique variants 2001 saw the introduction of the successor to the ZR1 in the form of the familiarly named Z06 Corvette which shared its moniker with the C2 from 40 years earlier while the retuned LS1 engine made less horsepower than the ZR1 reviews suggested Superior performance due to its smaller weight improved handling and ride quality that was increased through the implementation of an upgraded fe4 suspension it wasn't the only high performance offering of the fifth generation as the 50th Anniversary Edition RPO z25 would follow in 2003 and the 24 Hours of Le Mans Commemorative Edition Z16 would follow in 2004 but despite the success of the C5 and its revitalization of the Corvette brand Jim Perkins wouldn't be around for the actual launch of the car he managed to get green lid he retired in 1996 at the age of 61 making him basically one of the only prominent figures in these Corvette related RCR stories who wasn't shoved out by GM's mandatory 65-year retirement age but he left Chevrolet and resigned himself to a quiet life at his home in Fort Worth once again another Legend entering the annals of the Corvette's parentage so many different people can lay claim to having fathered different eras of the Corvette and as any good father would want the creation would live on long after its creators were gone after the original father of the Corvette Harley J Earl passed away in 1969 we saw changes as the brand entered a new era we saw this through the body style that lasted with gradual variations from the late 60s to the early 80s the C4 marked a considerable departure from what many had considered a Corvette to be and one could argue it ushered in the modern Corvette crystallizing an image of what many think of when they think Corvette but while Harley Earl set the tone for the Corvette we also had men like Zora Arcus duntoff who popularly held the title as father of the Corvette helping to establish the vehicle as a legitimate domestic sports car we had Bill Mitchell The Man Behind the stingray and the Mako Shark concept cars and Larry Shinoda the designer who helped shape the look of those mako sharks and the C3 and of course Jim Perkins who left the auto Indus history altogether after he helped ensure the Corvette survival into the C5 generation that is until he got the offer to run Hendrick Automotive Group within three months of his retirement suddenly he was in North Carolina managing the dealership group and rising to the rank of CEO and leading such programs as a 2009 initiative to rebuild retired race cars and other high performance Classics like the Chevy Camaros of his early tenure at GM and this is what he did for the rest of his life up until his final retirement Perkins passed away at the age of 83 on December 28 2018 but his legacy lives on through his actions in Saving a vehicle that has become as synonymous with Chevrolet as any vehicle they've ever produced perhaps more so it's strange to think back on the C4 and C5 eras of the Corvette we saw great advancement in both technology and performance yet this period was also characterized by the loss of so many Titans of the Corvette's history I know I wanted to keep each episode of this Trilogy relatively self-contained which is hard when you'd have to go back to Harley Earl and the birth of the Corvette to get the full history behind most of these men yet here we are when Bill Mitchell retired as Chief stylist in 1977 he went out on the 1977 Pontiac Phantom concept yet like so many people in these RCR stories retirement didn't mean his departure from the Auto industry in the aftermath of his retirement from GM he was outspoken about the direction the Corvette had taken having once said quote that square box is pretty near plastic the instrument panel Dracula's dressing room it rides like a truck it isn't a style car it's a machine car Engineers are running it Earl would never let that I would never let that happen and I condemn the guys for it end quote this was in 1988 over a decade after his departure from GM but he seemed to acknowledge that time had passed him by when he would add to his critique quote my time is over end quote yet Mitchell kept himself busy in the Years immediately following his retirement running a private design consulting firm William L Mitchell design until 1984. it showed that Mitchell had the soul of a designer even if his best known saying was quote I got gasoline in my veins end quote I'm like 900 sure he didn't say it anything like that though his mark on the legacy of the Corvette is unmistakable and it's reflected in every C2 or C3 Corvette still on the road if not in details of the Corvettes still being released today on September 12 1988 Bill Mitchell died from heart failure at the age of 76. less than a decade later you would see the passing of one of Mitchell's most noted colleagues Mr Larry Shinoda a man worthy of his own full RCR story Shinoda was a racing Enthusiast who got kicked out of the Art Center College of design in Los Angeles but still managed to get jobs at Ford Packard and then General Motors all in Rapid succession designing such Vehicles as the mako shark and honing the look of the original 1963 Corvette Stingray but then Shinoda also found himself locked in a bitter lawsuit over his work as a contracted designer for AMC to develop the vehicle that would become the Jeep ZJ or Jeep Grand Cherokee Shinoda would claim his design pitch for the Grand Cherokee was stolen by AMC Executives and that he got stiffed on the pay after Chrysler bought out the company in 1997 Chrysler came to a settlement of over two hundred thousand dollars yet Shinoda didn't live to enjoy it beyond the moral victory that came with it as he passed away of heart failure on November 13 1997 at age 67. but of all the men profiled both in this video and the previous entry in the Corvette Saga the man who is second only to Harley Earl is Zora Arcus duntov Arcus duntov retired in 1975 just two years before the passing of another Chevy Legend small block V8 developer Ed Cole he was succeeded as Corvette chief engineer by Dave McClellan yet Zora arkestuntov remained prominent in the automotive community in particular as an inductee into the automotive Hall of Fame the drag racing Hall of Fame and as one of the guests of honor at the 1992 rollout of the 1 millionth Corvette to come off the line at the Bowling Green assembly plan Arcus stuntov's Legacy wasn't just in getting the Corvette a manual transmission pairing it with Ed Cole's Chevy small block V8 or developing the first mass-produced American car to have four-wheel disc brakes no he put forth the argument that saved the Corvette from the ax in its first decade by issuing an internal document that made note of how Ford was beating them to the punch in terms of sporty Vehicles capable of extensive customization and modification now wait those terms are redundant no what whenever the kid stays in the picture without Zora Arcus duntov this video doesn't exist because every year after 1957 would have been the year without a Corvette Arcus duntov was instrumental in keeping the brand alive he made a public appearance at the National Corvette Museum for its groundbreaking in 1994 where a nearby Street had been named in his honor two years later he was a guest speaker at an event celebrating the uniquely American Legacy of the Corvette this despite battling cancer however six weeks after this guest appearance on April 21st 1996 Zora Arcus duntov died from kidney failure related to his battle with cancer he was 86. Pulitzer prize-winning Author George Will eulogized arkestontov by declaring that quote if you do not mourn his passing you are not a good American end quote yet Arcus duntov himself never really understood the hype around his supposed Legacy telling the LA Times in a 1991 interview that quote a man puts his pants on one leg at a time so the fuss about me is out of proportion I really didn't create anything genius I just make a good car end quote yet he wasn't shy about expressing his disappointment with all the goals left unfulfilled with regards to the Corvette quote I know that I give lots of people joy and I'm happy for that but my satisfaction with the car was never really full because I was always constrained today's Corvette would be a mid-engined car and four-wheel driven four-wheel drive for better traction needed in a high performance car mid-engine for better balance more efficient braking end quote it was a dream Zora Arcus duntov would never live to see fulfilled but it was fulfilled it just took another 23 years to happen of course the things we want don't always happen when we want them to sometimes they don't happen at all or if they do they're unfulfilling and yet Corvette is very much the product of its time period perhaps a mid-engine Corvette missed its peak however time is funny like that history is funny like that I mean the universe is funny like that the march to a mid-engine Corvette has been long in the making I'm talking a good 60 years or more and it's always the same story a mid-engine Corvette is planned it almost happens and then it gets cut off at the knees for any number of reasons both controllable and unmanageable racing bands bankruptcies internal opposition engineering Logistics and mechanical limitations for as many times as the Corvette has almost been killed only to be saved at the last moment the inverse is true of the mid-engine variant a dream nearly realized But ultimately curtailed I talked in previous videos about how Zora ARCA stuntav tried to get the Open Wheel single seat served One racer off the ground as something of a test run for a mid-engine Corvette in 1960 but the AMA racing ban prevented the serve one from going any farther than it did the serve 2 didn't fare much better in terms of sparking a revolution towards mid-engine possibilities if nothing else it was a proof of concept rather than a prototype but by 1968 arkestuntov was ready to try again with the Astro 2 xp-880 concept it was a mid-engine sports car that had the potential to influence the Corvette's third generation he engineered the car while Bill Mitchell and Larry Shinoda came up with the design and what we got was a gorgeous example of what could happen when the two men directed their efforts towards a singular goal the 390 horsepower 427 cubic inch V8 was mid-mounted and unlike the serve 1 was a two-seater it had its co-debut at the 1968 New York Auto Show with the C3 Corvette and made the rounds on the car show circuit but this time cost was the issue since the investment required to bring the Astro 2 into production offered no guarantee of a positive return and if I had to theorize I would also think that GM didn't want a New Concept to steal Thunder from the incoming C3 so again back to the drawing board and okay fine maybe those Concepts didn't make sense for that time period the boogeyman of production costs is one of the biggest enemies of Automotive Evolution and it often loomed large yet the question remains did we really need to wait what over 60 years to experience what a mid-engine Corvette could do well guess and no this is Corvette the march to mid-engine the 70s opened up the ambition to get more adventurous with the Corvette to push beyond the mechanical and technological limitations of the day in service of achieving something that could proudly redefine the brand and take Chevrolet to a new level of credibility among Die Hard Auto enthusiasts and sports car Fanatics however the served won and served two concepts were axed followed quickly by the Astro 2 getting shot down so I don't think anyone would have blamed a SORA Arcus stuntav for giving up on hopes for a mid-engine Corvette but Arcus stuntav felt he truly had something that could outperform any Corvette on the market with the xp-882 concept and he came to this realization despite running up against opposition in late 1969. you see Chevy general manager John DeLorean didn't really get the XP 882 and decided to put the kibosh on the project all together that August his plan was to divert resources towards increasing the profitability of the Corvette so how would he do this well he would cut down on production costs through the use of the Camaro chassis that was the plan anyway until it came to light that Ford planned on buying Italian automaker De Tomaso in order to remarket the mid-engine Pantera as a Ford vehicle in a way it goes back to that letter Arcus duntov wrote that saved the Corvette in its early years by noting how Ford had them dead to rights among the hot rodding community and they had to make the Corvette more of a performance car to keep pace and it certainly helped his argument for a mid-engine Corvette when it became public knowledge that Mercedes-Benz was working on a mid-engine c-111 while AMC had teamed with Italian automaker bizarini for their own mid-engine offering Scott Teeters expands on the situation in his article for Automobile Magazine titled the 1970 xp-882 mid-engine Corvette prototype was meant to be a world beater quote duntov showed Bill Mitchell and Chevy's chief of engineering Alex Mayar his mothballed xp-882 the decision was immediate get the car into the New York show the xp-882 was quickly painted silver and dressed as a show car the interior was utilitarian because the xp-882 never had a chance to get fitted with a proper interior there wasn't time the car magazines were all over the XP 882 though initiating a Feeding Frenzy of speculation that it would become the 1973 Corvette enthusiasts had been lusting for a smaller lighter Corvette for years and the xp-882 looked like it could deliver compared to a 70 Corvette the wheelbase was 2.5 inches shorter the length was eight inches shorter the width was 5.8 inches wider and at 2595 pounds it was almost 700 pounds lighter of course it was a prototype and not a fully featured car end quote the Prototype shown at the auto show had a patchwork powertrain that took a 400 cubic inch small block V8 an Oldsmobile Toronado turbo 400 transmission and a stock Corvette rear the suspension was mostly just production Parts John DeLorean gave the go-ahead to make the car but he wanted a big block four speed variant and sure whatever let's just roll with it because hey at least there was finally hope for some progress on a mid-engine Corvette that is until small block V8 developer Ed Cole who had since risen to the role of GM president bought General Motors the license to develop the Wankel engine suddenly he wanted Zora Arcus duntov to drop everything he was doing and focus on making a version that would work with this supposed mid-engine Corvette outsourced the job to his engine developer Gibb hoofstadter with the directive to just make a fast car hoofstadter came up with a solution in two short months Teeters recounts quote the layout consisted of two separate Wankel engines one on each side of a shaft that ran back to the bevels at the transmission output each engine was 90 degrees out of phase to smooth out the performance a toothed and grooved Cog belt ran the ignition alternator and fuel pump while a v-belt controlled the air conditioning power steering and water pump the combined size of the two engines was 585 cubic inches and was rated at 350 to 370 horsepower hoofstar said with some development the setup could make as much as 480 horsepower end quote the proponents for a mid-engine Corvette were in dire need of a solution since everything they tried came up short for example the unibody xp895 Concept in 1972 had to be retooled with an all-aluminum model when it was found that the initial prototype weighed too much this prompted Chevy to work with Reynolds metals to meet their aluminum needs which took 500 pounds off the weight of the Prototype however the car couldn't go to production because the adhesive bonding techniques needed to build the aluminum unibody would have been too expensive so the team pivoted with hoof's daughter cracking the nut of the Wankel engine conundrum we ultimately ended up with the xp-897 GT Concept in 1973. initially a show car meant to demonstrate the viability of a mid-engine Corvette for the 1975 model year the two rotor Corvette was the most promising concept yet at least until I had Cole lost interest in the Wankel engine okay I'm over exaggerating sure Cole's interest in the Wankel engine waned over the years but the simple truth was that the two rotor just didn't perform all that well nor did its four rotor counterpart which offered 420 horsepower and styling flourishes that included Gullwing doors sounds cool but it wasn't logistically sound from a production standpoint and there were other pressing issues at the time like the Arab oil crisis I know we always talk about it but it's important here and there's the recession that went hand in hand with the Embargo and the rising popularity of fuel efficient Imports it just didn't make sense to put the four rotor out there but even then Bill Mitchell loved the design so much that he decided to restyle it into the Aero vet in 1977 using the xp-895 powertrain and this got tongues wagging inside GM by that point some of the holdups that the higher-ups had about the four rotor weren't as big of an issue anymore as the company looked to what styles could represent the future of the Corvette brand in both performance and visual aesthetic could this aerofed finally be the one to get the mid-engine layout to Market well things were certainly looking optimistic enough when the Aero vet was actually approved for development to release for the 1980 model year but optimism doesn't pay the bills in the intervening years the Aero vet had lost its two biggest Champions as both Zora arkestuntov and Bill Mitchell were gone from GM having retired from their respective positions and their successors were knee-deep in getting the C4 Corvette off the ground and needed to divert funds and resources to its development it was a necessary evil to keep the Corvette alive at all since the design and production teams were already well behind schedule on getting a C4 to Market and the C3 was long in the tooth I mean it's not like Corvette sales were this huge anchor around the neck of Chevrolet anyway but it was clear that it was time for a refresh and one that made sense so farewell mid-engine Aero vet it was kind of sad actually case in point chief engineer Dave McClellan recounted in his book Corvette from the inside that when duntov retired he made one last request quote Dave you must do the mid-engine Corvette end quote it was an urgent plea from a man who knew this was the way of the future but in the years that followed McClellan was fighting an uphill battle because the suits thought a mid-engine layout would make for a cramped ride that was an even bigger pain in the ass to service there was also the fear that the design team would insist on using the Aero vets Gullwing door layout which meant no target top and no convertible options meaning diminished sales for consumers who wanted those specific options so it just couldn't happen too much would have to change and fear of change is the enemy of progress with that said the mid-80s saw GM take another crack at a mid-engine Corvette with a variant on the C4 the team would work on refining the Chevrolet Corvette Indie show car concept for this exact purpose the car was the brainchild of designer Tom Peters who dreamed of working at GM in his Youth and who'd One Day become director of exterior design himself the car also received guidance from legendary Studio director Jerry Palmer and support from executive Chuck Jordan as Peters were called in his Corvette Hall of Fame induction in 2019 working on a mid-engine Corvette was the realization of a dream dating back to his first encounter with a stingray quote I could feel the electricity in a studio led by Jerry Palmer one of the first assignments he gave me was to work on a Corvette mid-engine concept using the Lotus Indie engine when we were done I looked at it and remembered the 1963 Stingray spaceship I saw as a kid way back when and here I am in this exclusive hallowed area working on this vehicle end quote the magnitude of the mid-engine's potential was not lost on Peters and there was something to his spaceship analogy I mean the shape of the Indie show car called to mind an experimental aircraft of some kind the type you'd imagine a kid would draw to represent a UFO any leaner or sleeker and it'd be a disc with wheels for crying out loud the damn thing was crafted from a combination of carbon fiber and Kevlar with the Monaco shell underneath it was made to move to be as exciting as it was bizarre it was an ideal representation of futurism and the notion that we could achieve the types of technological advancement that was promised through the science fiction of the mid-20th century and earlier that it was no longer a dream the future is here the future is now the Corvette Indie had all the potential in the world to be exactly what its name suggested a true blue racer after a hasty six-week assembly the car was displayed at the 1986 North American International Auto Show in Detroit it wasn't operational but Lotus had developed a 2.6 liter twin turbo V8 for use with the vehicle the rumor at the time was that it was capable of 600 horsepower a top speed of 180 miles per hour and a 0-60 time clocking in at under 5 seconds in a way the response to the Corvette Indie called to mind the reaction to the C1 back at Motorama in 1953 people were excited not just those in attendance at the auto show but the executives in charge who showed a rare enthusiasm at the possibility of a mid-engine Corvette so two models were commissioned one used to drum up publicity and another for actual testing and Engineering naturally Chevy didn't bother using the twin turbo for the publicity version which was a fiberglass model running on a 5.7 liter V8 from Lotus the testing went well enough to impress GM Executives for their part Chevrolet contributed four-wheel steering four-wheel drive anti-lock brakes and electronic refinements like a view screen on the dash and CRT information display units granted the car only sat one with the engine being located behind that single seat but it was progress towards the realization of a long-held goal yet the Corvette Indy couldn't really go into production with a model that only sat one person not if you wanted to actually sell a lot of them and so the concept changed as the C4 carried on in the background and the 80s led to a more forthright effort in 1990 to bring a mid-engine Corvette to light yet as with all aspects of Automotive development it seems what manifested was a struggle not unlike those that had come before realistically the Corvette Indy could never work as designed the technology and performance were all there but very little about it was commercial in a conventional sense it didn't really look like a Corvette you couldn't have any passengers it would have likely caused a downright extortionate price to manufacture much less to sell to Consumers it had all the Hallmarks of an investment that would be difficult to recoup If released in its then present form so the Corvette Indie transformed into the serve 3 concept an attempt to take the Corvette Indie and make something GM could actually sell in research development and testing the serve 3 actually accomplished what the Aero vet couldn't a level of practical functionality that encouraged GM executives the surf 3 offered fuel injection thanks to the computer-controlled systems implemented by engineer dick ballsy with styling cues taken from Studio head Jerry Palmer such as a shorter nose and redesigned rocker panels to fit side mounted fuel cells like the Corvette Indie Lotus was actively involved building the car from the ground up four-wheel power steering computer-controlled active suspension with titanium Springs abs and traction control and a 38 pound backbone chassis with four hydraulic mounts two turbo hydramatic 425 Transmissions were used with parts from a 475 creating a six-speed automatic working in harmony with a mid-mounted 5.7 liter 32 valve dual overhead cam lt5 V8 that used twin turbos and made some 650 horsepower and 655 pound-feet of torque hitting a mind-bending top speed of 225 miles per hour and a 3.9 seconds 0 to 60 time once again like the Corvette Indy it was both a research vehicle and a show car as this also made its way to the auto show in Detroit to encouraging responses I mean that's good right so what went wrong then in part two of this Corvette Trilogy I made note of the declining sales of the Corvette in the 90s with figures hovering in the low 20 thousands by GM standards that just wasn't going to toast company bread they would have had to charge somewhere in the neighborhood of three hundred thousand dollars to see any sort of return and although Chevy eventually moved forward with a surf 4 prototype the surf 3 was the end of the line for mid-engine Corvette Concepts as the serve 4 was more about keeping the Corvette alive in the first place rather than moving it to a mid-engine layout to once again hark back to the previous video I made note of Jim Perkins the man who helped Wrangle the funds to build a mule vehicle for the C5 Corvette with the hopes of proving the GM Executives who'd soured on the Corvette that it deserved to survive into a fifth generation the surf 4 was just such a test mule for the C5 running on a 5.7 liter LT1 V8 engine paired with a six-speed manual transmission it helped get the C5 made when it truly seemed as though the bottom was falling out in all hope of a fifth generation was lost and yet it didn't really do anything to advance the cause of a mid-engine Corvette of course there were elements that made vague suggestions towards a mid-engine Corvette in the design of the 1997 C5 as Don Sherman writes in his article for Hagerty titled the mid-engine Corvette is 60 years in the making quote although a mid-engine layout failed to make the cut for the 1997 C5 Corvette Engineers did detach the transmission from the engine sliding it rearward nearly six feet to a location matching that in the original serve in unit width and just ahead of the differential since the rear wheels were also shifted rearward the wheelbase Grew From 96.2 inches to 104.6 inches and there was minimal change in weight distribution what chief engineer Dave McClellan sought here was a significant increase in torsional stiffness achieved by adding a central backbone frame member in the space previously occupied by the transmission end quote but all of this came after the departure of Dave McClellan following his 1992 retirement he wasn't around for the C5 although you could argue his influence helped Corvette last long enough to even see a fifth generation but by this point we were far removed from the relative purity of Harley Earl's Design Studio where it was less about convincing people to just let you make a car and more about just making the damn car a meritocracy of gears and logic always moving forward always trying to evolve but recognizing that not everything is going to work the way you want it to but then maybe that's all just rose-colored glasses after all the life of the Corvette has always involved mitigating expectations for better or worse it's a challenge but someone has to answer it Dave Hill took over as chief engineer and he was a pragmatist who maintained the front engine status quo but sought technological advancement in other areas maybe he didn't plan on implementing a mid-engine Corvette but that didn't mean he didn't still want to see the brand make strides forward or at least I can't find anything to suggest he hindered efforts Beyond just keeping the same layout the Corvette always had for time and cost based reasons in fact if anything Hill would inadvertently become instrumental to the implementation of a mid-engine to the Corvette through a choice he made for his assistant in 1993. a man by the name of Taj juktar I looked it up in two places that's how it's pronounced from what I can find apologies if that's not how you say it but regardless Taj Victor was an engineer whose name would become synonymous with the mid-engine March ahead but more on him in a bit as the Corvette entered the 21st Century Chevrolet continued to ride the success of the C5 while planning a tighter design for the C6 as with previous generations the design mentality was to refine what was already there rather than reinvent the wheel entirely computer-assisted gear shifting was required to keep the C6 from falling victim to the gas guzzler attacks as this technology let the driver shift from first to Fourth at low RPMs but it didn't dull the excitement among Corvette aficionados as you got an LS2 engine making 400 horsepower and 400 pound-feet of torque with either a six-speed manual or automatic transmission the eventual LS3 would boost ratings to 430 horsepower and 424 torque C6 also offered new Bodywork and updated independent double Wishbone suspension with transverse fiberglass mono leaf springs and an automatic transmission that offered fuel economy in the neighborhood of 15 City and 25 Highway the manual offered 16 MPG City and 26 Highway along with the aforementioned computer-aided gear shifting so hey one more mile per gallon per roadway it's it's called progress that's what we yeah progress yay for the most part the car maintained the style and presence of the previous generation offering an aura that suggested a far more exotic car than the Corvette actually was and this was the goal to become a name in performance at least domestically and stand shoulder to shoulder with imports sports cars to this end like the C5 prior the C6 received a high performance co6 version except this featured the largest small block Chevy V8 engine ever made up to that point the 7 liter LS7 V8 making 505 horsepower and 470 pound-feet of torque in addition to stiffer Springs shocks and a lighter aluminum frame it handled like a champ the ZR1 that followed kicked things up a notch GM tried to hide the car from prying Eyes by testing it under camouflage and referring to it internally under the code name Project Blue Devil but despite their best efforts the projects still leaked ahead of its announcement in December 2007 with the high performance variant offering a 6.2 liter ls9 V8 making 638 horsepower and 604 pound-feet of torque with a Chevy boasted top speed of 205 miles per hour however the noteworthy aspects of this phase are less about the car and more about the crisis that for the second time in 15 years nearly got the Corvette killed it was 2008 and the financial crisis saw automakers tightening their wallets this led to the departure of Tom Wallace who'd taken over as chief engineer in 2005 from the outgoing Dave Hill Wallace wanted a mid-engine Corvette but GM was in dire Financial Straits and vice chairman Bob Lutz didn't think he could save the Corvette so Wallace took early retirement financial crisis got worse and GM declared bankruptcy in 2009 yet this bankruptcy may have indirectly saved the mid-engine Corvette by saving the Corvette our buddy Taj Joker this is where he enters our story proper as assistant chief engineer jukether had continued working on the planned C7 putting a contingency into place by organizing a book of home phone numbers in the event that the Bowling Green GM plan and the Corvette itself were sold off or otherwise saved in which case there'd be no trouble getting the old team back together the situation was looking Bleak it really could have been the end for the Corvette the only thing left was to break out the shovels and start digging barring some sort of miracle and if he can make that Miracle happen jukder was going to try if for no other reason than to save the jobs of his colleagues and the car they'd come to regard with such reverence in a conference call with the U.S treasury Department task force which was evaluating GM's business operations Jupiter would argue in favor of keeping the Corvette alive recalls in an interview with car and driver for their 2018 article titled how the Chevrolet Corvette was saved from Extinction twice quote we went around the room introducing ourselves and when I introduced myself as Corvette chief engineer one consultant said what can you tell me about C7 the same question we were getting from our customers I thought wow this guy knows the lingo and wants to know about C7 he may get it they got into our books and saw that Corvette made money so getting going on a new one was on the to-do list coming out of bankruptcy it was spared as an extremely valuable brand that is known globally and the Bowling Green assembly plant was also spared end quote now the article continues jukeder's account with input from Jupiter directly quote yet still as GM was emerging from its government-guided bankruptcy nothing was happening on C7 then jukder saw Fritz Henderson who had succeeded Rick Wagoner as gmceo on the auto line Detroit TV program people were phoning in questions jukder recalls and one asked when are we going to get a new Corvette Fritz said we're working on one right now we're doing an evolutionary but major change off the C6 which was wrong he was either misinformed or wishfully thinking the next day a friend of Henderson's who decided to buy a Corvette emailed him some questions Henderson passed them along to jukder for answers which gave Joker the opportunity to say that he had seen Henderson on auto line Detroit and they were definitely not yet working on a new Corvette Henderson responded well we'll see about that end quote somehow the Corvette managed to see another day truly the automotive equivalent of a cab not for The Nine Lives analogy but because the brand always miraculously managed to land on its feet and yet in spite of this the C7 Corvette wasn't officially announced until late 2012 and it didn't debut until January 2013 as a car for the 2014 model year so like the C4 there was a wait for the new model that carried on longer than anyone cared to endure but there were higher hopes with this model since it was being conceived with a mid-engine layout or rather it would have been except for development costs rearing their ugly head once again we were barely five years removed from the big Automotive bailout and it was more important than ever to be fiscally responsible and far more measured with any potential risks in the design Department in short while it sounded like a good idea for a mid-engine Corvette it just wasn't the right time for it especially in a period where it seemed Enthusiast cars were growing less popular as the years wore on ultimately GM opted to keep the front engine rear-wheel drive layout for the C7 utilizing a 6.2 liter small block V8 making 455 horsepower and 460 torque the car was matched to a 7-speed manual transmission although a six-speed automatic was also offered this was of course before the manual Armageddon for the Corvette which was a design choice that continues to Wrangle plenty of fans in the automotive Community today but sometimes the engineering and design processes are about appealing to the widest possible demographic rather than a sadly shrinking niche in North America on the subject of design for all the talk of the many fathers of the Corvette I would be remiss if I overlooked the woman who helped shape the appearance of the C7 Stingray it's a short detour but one that feels necessary as it brings us full circle from the damsels of design employed by Harley Earl in the age of the c1's creation it's also significant considering the C7 marks a point at which the Corvette reclaimed aspects of its former Heritage in the sense that it was the first to Bear the stingray name since 1968. Helen emsley was chosen to design the interior for this Watershed Corvette owing to her nearly 20 years of experience in the design Department of GM beginning at opal before moving on to Holden and finally arriving in Detroit near the turn of the century according to emsley herself she found her promotion to the position surprising not so much because she was a woman but because she was British and as emsley herself said quote I have no history with an American icon end quote of course that didn't really stop Zora Arcus duntov when he first came to the U.S or any of a number of foreign Engineers who've had a proud hand in American automotive design but under emsley the interior took on an approach meant to engage both driver and passenger utilizing carbon fiber leather and hand stitching as a slick technological Sheen was applied to everything from the dashboard to the smaller steering wheel intended for more exact steering adjustments and all this situated within something akin to a jet fighter cockpit with select passenger controls moved just north of the glove box in an approach that worked from cues provided by workers at the Bowling Green facility as emsley and her team traveled to Kentucky to ask the workers what they thought the new Corvette interior needed this in addition to focus groups from both Corvette owners and owners of rival sports cars emsley's approach was an open one all ideas were invited all opinions welcomed hell she even created a new shade of red for the stingray called adrenaline red which is a fitting name for a car that could go from 0 to 60 in 3.8 seconds a car that will always bear emsley's Personal Touch now upon its debut for the 2014 model over 37 000 C7 Stingray units were produced across its Coop and convertible options with the implementation of Grand Sport ZR1 and Z06 models production would climb to a generation high of 40 689 in 2016. granted the C7 would face a major hiccup in 2018 plummeting to just 9686 units the lowest since 1959 but there was a good reason the bowling green plant had been shut down for roughly three months so production for that model year only began on June 5th 2017 and ended on January 28 2018 so it was a much shorter production cycle than normal but regardless of the reasons the C7 was a success for Chevrolet and GM at large as the dream was just around the corner in an appeal to a younger generation of Auto enthusiasts GM finally gave Chevy the go-ahead it almost seemed too good to be true a mid-engine Corvette for the 8th generation just like that after all this like we're just doing this now well yeah actually on July 18 2019 the ca Corvette was finally announced after all the served prototypes after the test mule for the C5 after the rerouted plans for the C7 it was here at last Chevy offered a mid-engine Corvette its first mid-engine sports car since they killed the Fiero in 1988. the base level C8 Corvette Sports the 6.2 liter lt2 V8 and 490 horsepower and 465 pound-feet of torque and with the performance exhaust you get 495 horsepower and for 70 pound feet I mean it's just it's something that has been a long time coming this in addition to 8-speed dual clutch transmission a 0 to 60 time of less than three seconds a literal jet fighter inspired interior just like Helen emsley's design and suspension lift enabled by the onboard GPS which can store up to 1 000 locations where the lift will be engaged automatically and all this for a price tag that was just under sixty thousand by like five dollars but still whatever the world was ready to experience the mid-engine Corvette at long last except there would be one final hurdle okay so it wouldn't be that easy it couldn't be that easy there had to be more to the story and there was last year Travis akulski sat down with chief engineer Taj juchter as well as design manager Kirk bennion and product marketing manager Harlan Charles for a road and track article titled the story behind the C8 Corvette in the interview jukter explains the difficult process that finally led to the C8 Crossing that 70-year finish line quote we sold it before bankruptcy to Bob Lutz at that time the attitude was no we have a great formula it's working great why would we mess with it but there were always technical reasons to do it we also had demographic reasons honestly we did a clinic where we took the same generic design language not a Corvette and put it over front and mid-engine cars we found our current customers are happy either way but people that we'd like to get they'd rather have a mid-engine given that our customer base was getting older every year we had additional support that it was a good idea end quote when asked how they reacted to the car's approval from the higher ups Harlan Charles recalled expressing concern over whether he'd even be allowed to talk about it until the realization set in by April 2019 that in essence it was too late for GM to back out so this was happening yet even after the announcement they still didn't feel like they could talk about it in anything other than hushed Whispers And I get it when you finally get a car like a mid-engine Corvette approved something with this much anticipation there's almost the expectation if not the anticipation that things will go wrong if nothing else the men seemed prepared for backlash jukether recalled criticism about why they couldn't also keep the old front engine option on the market rather than gambling it all on a mid-engine layout but Jupiter noted quote after we got this nailed as to what it looks like what the specs are going to be what the reality of it was you park them side by side you can't sell the old car end quote Kirk bennion added to the comparison between the front engine and mid-engine cars stating quote it looks a ton older this car looks way more expensive exotic end quote naturally the men addressed concerns about the Uproar over the lack of a manual transmission but Jupiter's defense was that the design team tried but it made for too tight of a squeeze considering the pedal box and how close it would be to the wheel the pedals would have to be far too close to make any kind of sense from a design standpoint much less safety concerns you know what I mean yet Jupiter expressed enthusiasm over the hype that surrounded the mid-engine Corvette stating that kids who weren't even old enough to drive had already grasped onto the notion of a mid-engine Corvette as a quote aspirational unicorn Harlan Charles concluded by stating quote this car I think is the opportunity for this younger generation this is going to be their Corvette that's the one that the first time they see it it's so exciting such a big change end quote and now that's only a fraction of the whole story of that interview and article so definitely check it out it's just a really well done article and interview that asks really incisive questions so definitely check it out so yeah we finally have a Corvette that's marched across the 70-year Finish Line we've provided you're rounding up a true mid-engine Corvette but could it march across a picket line let's back up with Corvette enthusiasts and non-believers alike the C8 was about as anticipated as any car release of the past decade yet its release ran into a bit of a snag and it's completely understandable why it happened as efforts were being mobilized to get the C8 into production the United Auto Workers Union organized its largest strike since 1970 which was covered in a previous installment in this series sort of a full circle final boss yet this final boss was a bit more sympathetic than the kefkas and ganondorfs and Frank fontaines and liquid ocelots of the world back on November 26 2018 GM announced plans to restructure the company these plans threatened to shutter five plants across North America with a potential loss of nearly 15 000 jobs GM chief executive Mary Barra claimed the restructuring was due to excess manufacturing capacity but three months later on February 26 2019 the United Auto Workers Union formally sued GM over this plan citing a 2015 collective bargaining agreement the company was violating enter Norwood Jewel the former labor relations liaison between the United Auto Workers Union and Fiat Chrysler in March 2019 Jewell pleaded guilty to misappropriation of funds using Union resources to pay for parties and other extravagances as the case played out GM considered selling the Lordstown Ohio plan to Workhorse Group Incorporated an electric vehicle startup unwilling to allow GM to offload responsibility the union demanded that GM Place one of its new products in the plan to give some measure of assurance but the company had no intention of doing that so Gary Jones president of the United Auto Workers Union entered negotiations in July by demanding that the plants threatened for closure remain open these negotiations began interestingly enough just two days prior to the official unveiling of the C8 on July 16 2019 GM and the United Auto Workers Union opened a formal contract negotiation for new four-year collective bargaining deal but there seemed to be some lingering resentment from previous protracted legal battles and the whole business with Norwood Jewel left the whole upper brass of the United Auto Workers Union seeming pretty shady I guess in the court of public opinion and things wouldn't really get better on this end because the feds got involved since Jones had a bit of a sketchy history himself basically in late August the FBI conducted a search of the Jones residence on suspicion of embezzlement and racketeering this culminated in the arrest of a senior Union official as part of a far-reaching corruption probe that allegedly named Jones and would eventually implicate Jones's vice president on charges of bribery and kickbacks with talks falling apart the workers made the decision to go on strike on September 16 2019 a decision which halted production in 31 GM factories and 21 and other facilities across the United States now GM could have tried to reopen negotiations with Jones's successor or at least reach some sort of temporary compromise to keep the union working in lieu of an outright strike but now General Motors was Swift and decisive with a movement to strike directly at the heart of what just about any worker values most about their job besides their pay GM cut health insurance for the Striking workers which had the effect of moving roughly 49 000 union members to the more expensive Cobra Insurance provided through the Union the backlash was instantaneous as some workers were uncertain if they would have any health coverage at all you could imagine the terror for any worker with a pre-existing condition or even the concern of having to pay for a more expensive Insurance option at a time when they weren't making any money and while you could make the argument that this is the risk you take when you go on strike these are people who wanted to be compensated fairly for their work it never seemed to me like an arbitrary strike these were people standing for what they felt they deserved for the work they put in and sometimes you have to gamble on yourself you know and look regardless of who was on the right side of this struggle I get the sense that the UAW knew the kind of backlash GM would get for pulling this move sure the federal case against Jones and Jewel made the United Auto Workers Union top brass seem pretty bad but also in the court of public opinion it wouldn't take much to turn the UAW into underdogs in this story presuming they weren't already the outcry had the potential to turn into a firestorm of negative publicity for GM a company that couldn't really afford to take it from both ends in the media so GM North America's vice president of Labor Relations personally wrote a letter to acting UAW vice president Terry dittus claiming quote GM is very concerned about the significant confusion caused around our employees health care coverage throughout this negotiation GM has said that our number one Focus was on the well-being of our employees That Remains the case today end quote GM promptly resumed benefits for its employees despite the ongoing strike in addition union members began receiving strike pay a sum between 250 to 275 dollars per week as September segued into October but as October rushed by and November neared the desperation was beginning to set in on both sides to have this strike over and done the UAW members wanted to get back to work they just wanted fairer conditions and GM wanted their workers back at work but they struggled to come to any sort of deal that would make Financial sense for them at least in their minds that is until October 25th when the two sides were able to reach a compromise as author Jamie L LaRue explains for the Detroit Free Press quote the union said the new contract will automatically make more than 900 temporary workers regular employees in January after that temps would get permanent jobs as they accrued time on the job under terms of the new contract their benefits improve and the union has a voice in how many temporary workers the company can add likewise all in progression workers would get a raise within 52 weeks of their last raise under the old contract those hired after 2007 dubbed in progression workers start at 17 an hour and can move up to 28 dollars an hour after eight years this new deal provides for them to reach 32.32 cents an hour by the time the new contract expires in 2023. end quote nearly concurrent with the end of the strike in October the C8 convertible was unveiled along with a racing variant known as the c8r after a longer than average weight production on the C8 Corvette finally resumed on February 3rd 2020. and the response since its release has been more or less what you'd expect from a car as hyped as this one the mid-engine layout improved such aspects as handling response time and visibility the rear weight distribution sent more power to the rear wheels which when coupled with its more aerodynamic proportions made the C8 Corvette a car to be reckoned with and despite a big time slump in sales across the Auto industry in 2020 the C8 assured that the Corvette remained the best selling model in its class taking 43 percent of the market share in quarter 1 2020. its closest competition was the Porsche 911 which took some 29 percent of the market share granted many in its class had a higher price point than the 59 995 dollar base price of the new C8 but it's still a remarkable achievement to create a car that feels European without actually paying an insane premium of course I say that while acknowledging it's not a car I'll be able to afford anytime soon if ever and even then I like more modest cars than this anyway but the C8 Corvette is among the few cars I've ever driven where I understood the hype because the car ultimately lived up to it in the most complete way possible at least for me of course for more on everything from specs to driving performance check out our review of the C8 Corvette as that's essentially an appendage to this trilogy but needless to say this was the culmination of a seemingly interminable Journey the march to Mid Engine had finally reached its Terminus the grand Triumph of persistence in Engineering in marketing in meeting a demand albeit a very particular one but this is still not the end of the story not entirely the C8 Corvette had one unfortunate growing pain to endure before the last word we have to address the first recall in finally realizing the dream of a mid-engine Corvette the C8 was declared North American Car of the Year the Detroit Free Press car of the year the Motor Trend Car of the Year and it earned a feature on car and drivers 10 best for 2020. in some cases the positive press surrounding the car has mostly drowned out some of the criticisms people have had about it I doubt any automaker expects their vehicles to ever be recalled but they accept that in some cases cars within their Fleet will inevitably be hit by the big bad capital r so here's hoping that whatever the car is recalled for it's not something that could kill someone right get for the C8 Corvette's first recall we have something fairly bizarre people are getting locked in the frunk well not exactly but they could technically be locked in the front as it turns out Chevrolet has failed Federal Motor Vehicle Safety standard 401 which is the official name for the requirement for all vehicles to have an interior trunk release in the event someone gets locked inside now the issue here isn't that the frunk is inherently a trap any more than a standard trunk would be it deals with the release button itself and its body functionality after the car has been powered down for more than 10 minutes here's the recall released directly from Chevrolet released on August 6 2020. quote these vehicles are designed to enter a low power sleep mode 10 minutes after powering off the trunk lid release button located inside the front trunk compartment may not function while the vehicle is in this sleep mode as required by FMV SS 401 safety risk description if the trunk lid is left open a small person who climbs inside the front trunk compartment and closes the trunk lid while inside may not be able to get out without assistance increasing the risk of injury repair description GM will update the software in the vehicle's body control module to lower the voltage required to wake the vehicle from the low power sleep mode this will allow the interior trunk release button to function while the vehicle is in that mode owners who have accepted applicable terms and conditions will have the opportunity to accept these software changes using Wireless over-the-air technology without having to bring their vehicle to a dealership alternatively owners May schedule to have the updates performed at a GM dealer end quote okay first of all what kind of person gets in a frunk in the first place oh wait no okay never mind turns out this was a totally solvable problem but not the only one According to some owners you see a pair of C8 owners issued a complaint to the national highway traffic safety administration stating that the front trunk lid occasionally flew open at speed GM responded by issuing a statement to thedrive.com stating quote after isolated reports of 2020 Chevrolet Corvette hoods being inadvertently left open while being driven the engineering team is investigating the potential issue and will be working to prevent them moving forward we have not been able to identify any mechanical issues related to this situation we're looking at ways we can improve warnings of the hood being open by increasing the volume of warning Chimes and changing the messaging that appears in the DIC Vehicles already in the field would receive these changes through over-the-air updates end quote so GM is basically saying you know we didn't do anything wrong you guys just need to secure your hoods it was essentially putting the blame back on the consumer but who knows where the blame belongs in the grand scheme of things it's part of a story Stitch into the Quilted expanse of the American Auto industry like software that's patched later or movies that get directors cuts it seems nothing is ever truly finished nothing is ever truly complete it's why you see so much variation between models of a given generation with gradual style and mechanical changes from year to year Harley Earl and Alfred P Sloan's Dynamic obsolescence in action it can never be complete it can only reach a level of acceptable operation that is until the next model comes along and the previous model is rendered Obsolete and really cars should be held to a higher standard than something like a director's cut or a rushed video game considering the inherent danger cars can present but I also understand that it's unrealistic to think no car will ever have any issues that any car will ever be perfect no matter how long we've been waiting for it if nothing else this all feels like part of the life cycle of the Corvette some have had mechanical issues with these cars While others have just hated them from a mechanical style or performance perspective every Corvette in history has had its highs and lows and there will always be people who adore Corvettes people who hate them people who are defined by them and people who couldn't possibly care any less and all sorts of people in between but that's baked into the recipe of Automotive enthusiasm no car is universally praised no single car universally loved but each car has its own story its own unique history maybe a day will come when the Corvette is finally put out to pasture and the name plate Falls by the wayside as a forgotten brand from a bygone era but for now the Corvette persists even thrives as a car of Shifting identities whatever it needs to be whatever it needs to replace until the day comes when something else fills that function but until that day comes we have the Corvette and cheers to that thanks for watching everyone hey everyone thanks for checking out this complete cut of my Corvette history basically this started out as three separate videos on the main channel one of which actually was a finalist for the automotive Heritage Foundation Awards and that was the first part of the video which was the history the early history of the Corvette basically the Harley Earl story and it was one of the great privileges of my life to be able to share the story but also have it be recognized in that way but also I feel that the story kind of flows better as one large video and I feel like that kind of benefits the way people like to watch these videos at least in my experience to just let them play let them hang out in the background while you're doing your work or you know trying to fall asleep um Automotive History is fascinating in that way and it's very enriching to be able to come back to these stories you know and granted this video is or this project rather is around two years old but I feel like a lot of it has come to represent the evolution of the Corvette of what it is and what it's become and maybe there will come a time where you know I can have a sequel to it and talk a bit more about the Corvette and maybe add even more context and history it's something I genuinely love doing now this won't be available as a podcast in its complete form these are still available as podcasts in their individual form so in the Pod in our podcast feed if you look up RCR stories Corvette these will still show up just in their individual Parts this second Channel regular enrollment is the only place where you can get it complete so I hope you know you come back to enjoy this video again if it really you know scratched a niche you didn't know you needed scratched please like comment subscribe and hopefully I'll get to do many more of these in the years to come but for now thank you so much for watching for listening just for being you basically and giving me a chance to share a little bit of Automotive History with you have a great day a great week a great month a great year a great life and until the next one see you later

Channel: Regular and Roman

Views: 615,417

Keywords: regular car reviews, regularcars, rcr car stories, rcr stories, corvette, corvette history, chevy corvette, chevrolet corvette, automotive history, car history

Id: RfqUaTLICKI

Length: 187min 29sec (11249 seconds)

Published: Wed May 10 2023