When Driving Your C7 Corvette, Do You Use Eco Mode?

Is dropping down to V4 in your Corvette smart thinking or sports-car sacrilege?

The Corvette is one of the best sports cars that money can buy, and it is loaded with advanced performance technology at GM’s disposal to give owners the best experience. One of those pieces of technology isn’t particularly well-loved around the Corvette community, though.

You see, in the never-ending chase for better fuel economy and fewer emissions the new Corvette has a function that lets the car shut down half of its cylinders to save gas. But how many users actually take advantage of this feature? Forum member “Red62vette” jumped into the C7 threads to ask his fellow owners what their Eco usage looked like.

Unsurprisingly, there is a wealth of opinions on the matter, and all of them are strongly held.

Let’s break it down into the two general sides to the argument. On one hand, we have folks who use it regularly to stretch their gas money, with many reporting a boost of 2-3 mpg or more. For the other side of the fence, we have the performance purists. A sports car is a sports car, and if you want to get better fuel mileage, you should just buy something else. It’s all eight cylinders or nothing at all for these folks.

We don’t hold the keys to a C7, so our opinion is less than ideal here, but we think the V4 mode is a great idea. If you have to be stuck in a massive line of traffic on the way to work in the morning, no reason you can’t save a few dollars along the way. And while three or four mpg doesn’t sound like a ton, it’s actually a boost of more than 10-percent. That means that instead of going 450 miles on a tank, you’ll make it almost 500 miles. Or, to put it another way, you basically get two more gallons of gas for “free” with every fill up. Why wouldn’t you want that?

ALSO SEE: What the Forum Has to Say About Eco Mode

With all of that boring math out of the way, we want to say this. If we didn’t have an awful city commute every day, we would never even think about hitting that eco button. The Corvette is a proper sports car and should be treated that way any time you get a chance. If you can hit the back roads instead of the interstate and make it in the same general amount of time, then that is absolutely what you should do.

Like we said, though, we don’t own a C7 so we don’t have to make that decision. So we are looking to you for the answer. Hit our poll below and let us hear your thoughts on the matter. Do you despise the fuel-miser technology, or do you praise the flexibility it offers you to save money? Sound off below, and feel free to hit the main thread if you have more to add the conversation.

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