The C7 Corvette Almost Never Happened, and It Ended an Era

Before the C7 ever turned a wheel, the C6 had already set the bar high for its successor. That was the challenge Chevrolet laid on its engineers. Build a car that could out-run the old one and go toe to toe with the best from Germany and Italy, without looking like anything but a Corvette. What came back, the seventh generation, holds a strange spot in the history books. It was the fastest and most capable front-engine Corvette ever built, and it was also the last of them. When the last example left Bowling Green in 2019, a layout that had carried America’s sports car since 1953 was finished. What most forget is that the C7 Corvette almost never happened, and the car GM first set out to build was something else entirely.

A Corvette That Almost Didn’t Happen

Work on the C7 began not long after the C6 reached showrooms, and the ambitions were sky high. Chevrolet wanted to push the Corvette upmarket and go straight at Porsche and Ferrari. To get there, the engineers were seriously looking at a mid-engine layout. The reasoning was sound. The C6 had already run into the grip limits of a front-engine car, so moving the engine behind the driver was the obvious next step.