Chevrolet Carried Over a Single Part from the C7 When Designing the C8 Corvette
When Chevrolet announced that the 2020 Mid-Engine Corvette was all-new, they weren’t joking. Considering that this car takes almost everything we know about the traditional Corvette and throws it out the window, it should be no surprise to anyone that we’re entering uncharted territory here. Still, there’s a certain symmetry in the knowledge that the C8 does incorporate one part from the C7 Corvette. It serves as a “passing of the baton” and reminds us that there still a tiny bit of Corvette’s design history in the new mid-engine platform.
The question is – which part has been carried over? Chevy made the announcement that one part was carried over unchanged from the C7, but didn’t say what it was. However, our friends at Road and Track were able to dig deep and discover the answer.
Care to take a guess at what it might be?
No, it’s not the accelerator and/or brake pedals. It’s certainly not the clutch pedal (the C8 is currently only offered as an automatic.) The same engine block? Allegedly, NO, that’s new too, though the LT2 probably shares some common ancestry with the LT1 and the LS2/LS3 platform that preceded it (keep in mind that they all share the same 6.2L displacement.)
The answer? It’s the interior door latches.
We understand that it’s probably difficult to contain your excitement at this amazing revelation, but the latches are the same latches that were developed for the C7 Corvette, thereby tying the DNA between the two cars together (if at an almost utterly superficial level.) Could it be that this re-purposed door latch was the deciding factor that kept the car’s base price below $60,000? That’s almost certainly why (said nobody…ever)!
While we are obviously joking about this statement, we do wonder how a completely new, completely re-imagined car could be priced so competitively. Considering the amount of R&D that went into the car’s development, combined with all the manufacturing processes that will have to be updated to enable the new Mid-Engine Corvette to be built in Bowling Green in just a few months time, its a wonder this car isn’t two-to-three times the price that Mark Reuss, President of General Motors, claimed would be the starting price of the Mid-Engine Corvette.
We suspect that, buried within the new Mid-Engine Corvette, there are other components that draw from the earlier Corvette. Even the aforementioned LT2, despite all claims to its newness, must have remnants of the earlier engine platforms coursing thru it. We’re not suggesting that GM has simply re-worked the LT1. We do think, however, that the technology that was used to breathe life into the C6 and C7 generation Corvettes is still present here, and we’ll be excited to learn just how much of the older-generation Corvettes helped to fortify the “heartbeat” of the next-generation Corvette.
In the meantime, we continue to marvel at how GM was able to create something almost completely new and still offer it to consumers at a price that is sure to entice a lot of prospective buyers to step forward in the coming months.
