Watch the First Corvette E-Ray Roll off the Assembly Line at Bowling Green

The Corvette E-Ray is a truly groundbreaking machine, but it’s also one that GM always knew it was going to build.

It’s been a few months since the Corvette E-Ray was officially revealed, once again expanding the C8 lineup and giving shoppers a proper grand touring machine – not to mention, the very first electrified Corvette ever offered by GM. The E-Ray fills a perceived gap in the lineup by giving us more performance than the base Stingray with more of the looks of the Z06, albeit with a softer edge and more comfortable drive. Thus, it’s no surprise that plenty of folks rushed to their dealer to place a deposit down on a new Corvette E-Ray, and in this recent video from Yahoo Finance, we get to take a peek at the very first example rolling off the assembly line.

Yahoo Finance Senior Reporter Pras Subramanian was able to get this behind the scenes look at the Corvette E-Ray from conception to completion at the Bowling Green Assembly Plant in Kentucky, and it’s a pretty fascinating one, to boot. We start off after the car’s structural components have been mated together – including the powertrain and battery, which gets installed at the same time. All that’s left is to slap some wheels and a few other finishing pieces on there and complete final quality inspections and these cars are good to go.

GM’s General Assembly future product lead Andrew Kelner joins in to provide some additional details on Corvette E-Ray production as well, and he discusses some of the challenges involved in that process, too. One of the biggest lies in the fact that the E-Ray is the first all-wheel-drive Corvette ever, which required some retooling at Bowling Green to accommodate it, which was reportedly a challenging process, even though GM brass knew that the C8 lineup was going to include a hybrid at some point all through the development process.

With this in mind, during the retooling process for the C8 years ago, Kelner’s team left provisions on the assembly line with which it could use to install those heavy battery packs. As we’ve heard time and time again to this point, those efforts paid off big time in terms of creating a machine with a fantastic driving experience – along with plenty of performance – with Subramanian noting that the E-Ray feels like it’s “on rails” as it tackles corners.

Subramanian also visits the National Corvette Museum while he’s in Bowling Green, giving us a short look at where America’s sports car got its start, which helps us better understand just how far we’ve come over the past seven decades. However, one thing that hasn’t changed is the fact that the Corvette has long been a performance bargain – and the E-Ray continues that tradition in a big way, undercutting its competition by a large amount of money and making supreme performance attainable for many more – just like its ancestors have been doing for years now.

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