The Aerovette Was a C8 Four Decades Too Soon

By the late 1970s the paperwork was done. General Motors had signed off on a mid-engine Corvette for the 1980 model year, with a 350 cubic inch (5.7L) V8 mounted behind the seats, gullwing doors that folded in the middle and a projected window sticker between $15,000 and $18,000. That car never reached a showroom floor. The one that eventually did arrived in 2020 wearing a C8 badge, forty years after the model year Chevrolet had penciled in.

The Aerovette usually gets remembered as a beautiful concept born too early. The record supports something harder to shrug off. Chevrolet decided to build this car, then changed its mind and never really said so out loud.

Duntov Had Been Building Mid-Engine Corvettes for a Decade

Zora Arkus-Duntov started making the case long before anyone above him was ready to hear it. CERV I in 1960 and CERV II in 1964 were engineering vehicles rather than production prototypes, built to test ideas Chevrolet had no immediate intention of selling. CERV II ran all-wheel drive through a pair of transmissions, and that experiment stayed in Duntov’s thinking for the next fifteen years.

The XP-819 followed in 1964, developed by Chevrolet engineer Frank Winchell with a body from Larry Shinoda. It hung the V8 behind the rear axle in Porsche fashion rather than ahead of it, and the balance was wrong. The prototype was crashed during testing and ordered cut apart. Enthusiasts eventually rebuilt it from salvaged pieces.