Chevrolet Corvette
Like most of America , Harley Earl was impressed by European sports cars. He knew that there was no homegrown competition for the ever successful Jaguars and Ferraris, but as GM´s design chief he was in a position to do something about it. And he did, producing a two seat sportster, the EX-122 for the January 1953 Motorama.
As initial reaction to the car was so favorable, a virtually unchanged Corvette started rolling off the Flint production line just five months later, and the first American sports car was born.
Early Corvettes were more show tan go. The straight six unit was slow and the cockpit cramped, but GM was also losing money on each one. Production for ´53 stopped at about 300 cars, but while the company pondered the Corvettes´s future, Ford unveiled its own two-seater, the T-Bird.
Faced with the prospect of losing out its greatest rival, GM´s doubts soon vanished and production went into overdrive.
A vital option was offered in ´54 –the V8 engine.
Now with the grunt to match the looks, the Corvette was an irresistible package, and it went from strength to strength.
The first Corvette
The Chevrolet Corvette had an image problem at the outset because Chevrolet was derided by sports car enthusiasts as a manufacturer of dull family automobiles.
The young Americans attracted to Europeans sports models did not appreciate typical Chevy features such as Powerglide automatic transmission.
With their rounded styling and pod-type taillights, the 1953-55 models also, in some people´s view, fell short of classic looks.
Uncertain of the market they were aiming at, Chevrolet advertisers initially played down the Corvette´s potential as a racer, emphasizing its comfort and convenience.
The Corvette was saved by the efforts of engineers Ed Cole and Zora Arkus-Duntov, who by 1956 had turned it into a really hot car, with a powerful V8 and the three-speed manual transmission.
Only then sis the publicity men promote the Corvette as a genuine sports car with fiery performance.
Design and Production
The Corvette´s novel fiberglass body was originally adopted as a practical measure, enabling GM to rush through an initial production run of 300 cars as quickly and economically as possible.
Ironically, it proved to be the most durable feature of Corvettes through the following decades.
Bodies were made by the Molded Fiber Glass Company of Ashtabula , Ohio , using the matched-metal die process.
The total weight of the body parts was 340 lb (154kg).
The largest single piece was the underbody, to which the other panels were added in body assembly on a Chevrolet production line.
As a company geared to mass production, Chevrolet had to learn to cope with making the more specialized Corvettes at a slower rhythm. It had, in the words of one executive, to step out of its normal role of producing over 500 vehicles an hour, to make 500 specialized vehicles in, say, two weeks.
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