The Chevrolet Corvette is a line of American two-door, two-seater sports cars manufactured and marketed by General Motors under the Chevrolet marque since 1953. Throughout eight generations, indicated sequentially as C1 to C8, the Corvette is noted for its performance, distinctive styling, lightweight fiberglass or composite bodywork, and competitive pricing. The Corvette has had domestic mass-produced two-seater competitors fielded by American Motors, Ford, and Chrysler; it is the only one continuously produced by a United States auto manufacturer. It serves as Chevrolet's halo car. In 1953, GM executives accepted a suggestion by Myron Scott, then the assistant director of the Public Relations department, to name the company's new sports car after the corvette, a small, maneuverable warship.
Initially a relatively modest, lightweight six-cylinder convertible, subsequent introductions of V8 engines, competitive chassis innovations, and eventually rear mid-engined layout have gradually moved the Corvette upmarket and made it more sporty. In 1963, the second generation was introduced in coupe and convertible styles. The first three Corvette generations (1953–1982) employed body-on-frame construction, and since the C4 generation, introduced in 1983 as an early 1984 model, Corvettes have used GM's unibody Y‑body platform. All Corvettes used front mid-engine configuration for seven generations, through 2019, and transitioned to a rear mid-engined layout with the C8 generation. Initially manufactured in Flint, Michigan, and St. Louis, Missouri, the Corvette has been produced in B
From the Wikipedia article Chevrolet Corvette, CC BY-SA.
The Chevrolet Corvette is one of 277 Chevrolet models in the MotorJury library, the catalogue that sets out to hold every car ever made — production, prototype and concept alike. The record places its introduction in 1953. The photography on this page is hotlinked from Wikimedia Commons under an open licence, with the photographer credited on every frame.
To read the Chevrolet Corvette properly it helps to place it in its decade. The 1950s were the optimistic post-war boom, when chrome, tailfins and new unibody construction met the first purpose-built motorways and sports-car racing shaped reputations. Any car launched into that world was shaped by it — by what materials, engineering and regulation allowed, and by what buyers of the day demanded. Its direct contemporaries in this catalogue, introduced within three years of it, include the Mercedes-Benz Mercedes-Benz S-Class, the Cadillac Cadillac Eldorado, the Mercedes-Benz Mercedes-Benz 300 SL — the cars a buyer of the period would actually have cross-shopped.
On paper, the Chevrolet Corvette reads like this: the layout is Front-engine, rear-wheel-drive layout / FR layout/FMR Layout (1953–2019) / Rear mid-engine, rear-wheel-drive layout / RMR layout (2020–present). Every figure above is a manufacturer specification carried by the Wikipedia infobox or the open Wikidata record for this model — nothing on this page is estimated, and where a source is silent the row simply does not appear.
Within Chevrolet's own catalogue the Chevrolet Corvette sits alongside the Chevrolet Adra, the Chevrolet C-10, the Chevrolet Camaro (2015), the Chevrolet Corsa. Assembly is recorded at United States: / Flint, Michigan (1953) / St. Louis / St. Louis, Missouri (1954–1981) / Bowling Green, Kentucky (1981–present).
This library is generated, verified and rebuilt from the open record on every deploy. The catalogue skeleton comes from Wikidata, specifications from Wikipedia's infoboxes under CC BY-SA, photography from Wikimedia Commons under each file's own licence, and the ownership data from United States federal safety records. Nothing is written by hand and nothing is invented: every fact on this page traces to a public source, and every page is rebuilt nightly as those sources improve. Errors in the source record will appear here too — and disappear the night the source is corrected.
Most car databases stop at series production. This one deliberately does not, because concept cars, racing specials and cancelled prototypes are where the industry thinks out loud — the ideas tested in public years before they reach a showroom. Holding them beside the production cars they inspired makes the lineage legible: nearly every landmark road car in this library has a concept ancestor somewhere in the catalogue, and the connections run through the era links on every page.
What this page cannot yet tell you is what the Chevrolet Corvette costs to live with — that is a different dataset. MotorJury's ownership verdicts are computed from federal complaint and recall records plus EPA economy data, published per model year as the nightly ingest reaches each car. If this model was sold in the United States, its years will surface in the ownership database; browse it live or price any car yourself with the true-cost calculator.
Specifications come from the Wikipedia infobox for this model (CC BY-SA) and the open Wikidata record, and are shown only where a source actually carries them — nothing here is estimated. Figures are manufacturer specifications, not measured results.
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Ownership verdicts are computed from NHTSA complaint and recall records plus EPA economy data, re-priced for your country. Verdicts are published per model year as the data is ingested — browse them live, or open the true-cost calculator to price any year yourself.
Contemporaries from other marques, introduced within three years of this car.