That didn’t take long. A couple of days ago, we wrote about Mark Reuss previewing a car based on the C8 Corvette chassis. He told investors the car would arrive in 2025 and possess “incredible performance,” but he never called it a Corvette. Perhaps Reuss’ sidestep has something to do with Car and Driver running a piece by auto industry sleuth Georg Kacher with the headline, “Corvette to Launch as a Brand in 2025 with a Four-Door and an SUV.” These would be the first in an Ultium-based, all-electric Corvette family. It’s seems that when Reuss said the car-not-called-a-Corvette would use the sports car’s chassis, he meant the Ultium version of the Corvette chassis.
Obviously, both will be high performance. The four-door is said to be a liftback in the manner of competition like the Porsche Taycan and Audi E-Tron GT. Kacher described the SUV as “brawny.” There were no design details in the piece, only the insistence that the expanding lineup needs to represent the “essence of Corvette” in look and feel. The connection could be as demonstrative as the Cayenne representing the essence of the Porsche brand — let’s not forget, everybody bellyached about Porsche’s first SUV until they had a chance to drive it; as tenuous as the bond connecting the Ford Mustang Mach-E to the essence of the original pony car; or somewhere in the middle, like the Aston Martin DBX reworking the essence of the rest of Aston Martin’s range.
The mechanical overview reads like another GM moon shot, comprising “battery packs with high energy density, superfast software, a patented cooling concept, staggered Lego-like topographic packaging, miniaturized componentry, ultra-efficient inverters, high-revving electric motors, an 800-volt electrical system that provides up to 350 kW of charging power, a two-speed transmission, brake-by-wire, multi-mode four-wheel steering, and torque vectoring.” For starters.
Since 2025 is around the corner in automotive terms, we shouldn’t be surprised to see mules on the roads next year, with prototypes doing their best to hide their surprises come late next year or early 2025. If this is all true, at least. The standard ICE Corvette lineup has plenty on the way to keep us occupied in the meantime, but we’ll be on the lookout as of now.
