BY PATRICK BEDARD
As it rolls into its thirteenth model year, the Corvette is unquestionably one of America's longest-running new car hits, right up there with the Checker Marathon as a senior citizen of automobiledom. Thirteen years, that is, if you're just looking skin-deep. If you prefer to put aside the decorator fiberglass on the basis that the chassis, not the body, is really the heart of the Corvette, well, lessee, that was new in 1963 at the launch of the Sting Ray. So the Corvette is really in its eighteenth year.
And selling better than ever, it turns out. General Motors has always been shrewd at marketing, and with the Corvette it has a section of the new-car business all to itself. There's not another two-passenger sports car built in America. Sports-car buyers have to choose a Corvette, a foreign car, or nothing, and enough of them opt for the Corvette every year to keep the one assembly plant running at full speed. Of course this tidy little monopoly — what else could you call the business of making America's only sport car? — takes some of the urgency out of designing new Corvettes. There's not much incentive to tool up a modern sports car, or even maintain the performance that made the old one famous, if every year's batch will be a sellout anyway. So, although General Motors has made radical changes in all its other cars since 1977 — downsized them, made them more efficient and more responsive to the driver; in fact, GM now makes full six-passenger cars that take up less pavement than this two-seater — the Corvette team is still dithering with the same problems that concerned it in 1972. And still taking the easy way out.
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