New Corvette concept reimagines iconic sports car for Europe, but it won’t make production

‘Baseball, hot dogs, apple pie and Chevrolet’ was a catchy little jingle used in Chevrolet’s 1975 advertisement to help drive home how quintessentially American the company was. Times have obviously changed, though, and now parent firm General Motors has formed a design studio in Leamington Spa to create its interpretation of a future Corvette.

First, the formalities. While this striking concept might wear a Corvette badge (or a slick new minimalist reimagining of it), General Motors says “there is no production intention” behind the car, with a goal to simply “rethink the Corvette nameplate”.

The reveal of this Corvette design study coincided with the official opening of a General Motors Design Studio in the UK - the fifth design base for the American giant after its studio in Michigan, California, Shanghai and Incheon. The Leamington Spa studio is the smallest by capita, with 35 employees, but there’s plenty of room to grow. 

That’s just as well, because the UK studio is led by Julian Thomson – a renowned automotive designer who has the likes of the Lotus Elise S1 and Land Rover LRX (latterly Evoque) in his back catalogue. Speaking on what makes the studio a success and its future, Thomson said: “We would like to expand, but the intimacy of this team and how they work together is really important.” 

Having worked for Jaguar Land Rover for over 20 years and the Volkswagen Group before that, Thomson said of General Motors (who he joined in 2022 as the European Design Director); “GM is a very friendly place to work, you can sense the atmosphere here that likes working with each other. The real luxury I have is that we can treat it like a start-up consultancy, except we have a very big client that will always give us work. I’ve worked in environments which have been pretty competitive, not very sharing and not very nice so it’s refreshing for me.” 

The objective of the UK design studio is to provide ‘valuable insights into European customer and cultural trends’ and introduce ‘new talent and fresh perspectives into GM’s global network’ according to the American firm. The first ‘fresh perspective’ GM wanted was on the Corvette, which resulted in this incredibly sleek-looking, all-electric hypercar. “They’re not asking us to design a Chevrolet for Leamington Spa,” said Thomson, “they’re asking for our context as European designers and customers, what would be attractive to you. How we see something is very interesting to them.”

The studio uses a mix of new and old technology with virtual reality headsets able to 3D model a car digitally, to traditional clay models – both of which are a key part of the creative process. The clay models are sculpted by hand, but at the same time there are several large automated machines able to carve out the clay to the specifications of the digital design to 0.1mm. 

Michael Simcoe, senior VP of global design for GM said: “As part of the Corvette creative study, we asked multiple studios to develop hypercar concepts. It was important that they all pay homage to Corvette’s historic DNA,but each studio brought their own unique creative interpretation to the project. Which is exactly what our advanced design studio network is intended to do–push the envelope, challenge convention and imagine what could be.”

While inspiration for the concept comes from the sculptural and functional elements of fighter jets, GM also says it incorporates the Corvette’s design throughout its 70-year history with the central spine mimicking the rear split window shape of the Stingray an absolute must. Another key feature is the division of the upper and lower sections of the body. The painted upper focuses more on trying to capture classic design elements, while the lower part looks at ‘functional technical design, including EV battery technology embedded into the structure’. The lack of protruding wings can be put down to aerodynamic elements integrated into the lower section of the concept. 

Being a study of the Corvette’s design, technical details are neither here nor there - though some interesting tidbits were shared, possibly indicating where GM’s head is at regarding future performance technology. The concept uses a halo roof structure (like you get in Formula One), a wraparound windscreen for improved visibility, a fan duct to promote ground effect and a pushrod suspension set up.

Helping to quite literally stamp their own mark on the car is a new Corvette logo. A simple ‘Y’ shape replaces the French lily symbol and the Chevrolet logo flag crossed with a racing flag on the right side. Thomson said of this: “We’ve done an interpretation of it. It’s about the iconography of the brand. Challenging it and our desire to reinforce the power of that symbol.”

Would you like to see the Corvette concept make production? Let us know in the comments section...