When you’re at your Lumberton-area Corvette dealer, you can’t help but feel a little bit nostalgic. The Corvette has been the quintessential American sports car for more than half a century. Still, you may not know about those early days, about how the Corvette began.
The Corvette cam about largely because of Harley Earl. Earl was able to convince General Motors that a two-seat sports car was exactly what America needed at the time. The first Corvette was revealed at the 1953 Motorama car show. The vehicle took its name from a small fighting frigate called the “corvette.”
The early Corvettes were built mostly by hand at the Customer Delivery Center that Chevrolet ran in Flint, Michigan. The outer body of the Corvette was made of fiberglass, which was a relatively new material at the time. Since those days, every Corvette has had a fiberglass outer skin.
The Corvette almost was shelved in 1955. If it hadn’t been for the introduction of the V8 Chevrolet engine, we may never have had the Corvette we know and love today. An engineer named Zora Arkus-Duntov conbined a 4.6 liter version of Chevrolet’s new V8 and combined it with a four speed manual transmission. This gave the Corvette what it needed to compete with other sports cars like the Thunderbird.
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