2021 Corvette Has a Diesel Glow Plug Warning Light for No Particularly Good Reason

GM isn’t going to build a diesel version of America’s sports car, so why does the 2021 Corvette have this warning light?

Automotive manufacturers have been known to share parts between models in an effort to reduce complexity and save money. Sometimes, this is done rather seamlessly and most won’t even notice that their sports car has the same door handles or switches as a truck or economy car, while other times, it’s painfully obvious. But the 2021 Corvette has one of the silliest such shared features you’ll ever see – a diesel glow plug warning light, as first pointed out by Reddit user RefridgeratorRunner in this post.

Might GM be considering building a future Corvette model equipped with a diesel engine? Well, we’ll just say the chances of that are somewhere between slim to none. Thus, the inclusion of this feature on the 2021 Corvette raises a ton of questions – namely why, exactly, the automaker would install a warning light for a part that doesn’t even exist on America’s sports car, and likely never will?

As it turns out, there really isn’t a good answer to that question. When Jalopnik reached out to GM for some clarification on the strange warning light, the automaker’s response wasn’t exactly enlightening. “We appreciate the speculation, but that symbol was included as part of our standardization process,” a GM spokesperson said. “It is not indicative of any plans to add the feature to Corvette and we plan to remove the icon in the future. It’s an internal GM process when we sell cars in international markets. Sometimes we plan to share some of the displays across vehicle programs and so we standardize icon placements. We plan to remove the icon in the future.”

The interesting thing here is that the C8 Corvette’s instrument panel isn’t currently shared with any other vehicle, which means the automaker designed it specifically with a diesel glow plug warning light, all in the name of global standardization. There’s precisely a zero percent chance that this part will be shared with a future, global diesel model, or that there will one day be a diesel Corvette. So why go to all the trouble of adding a warning light to the instrument panel?

Most likely, the inclusion of this warning light was simply a mistake. The person tasked with designing the layout for the C8’s warning lights was probably just following protocol, unaware of the fact that it was destined for a vehicle that will never need it. But regardless of whether the presence of a diesel glow plug warning light was intentional or not, we can’t help but laugh at it.

Photos: Reddit, Chevrolet

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