My Generation: Walk Softly and Carry a Big Stick

One13thirteen has come and gone, and the unveiling Chevrolet promised was everything that loyal Corvette enthusiasts expected. Though the final design was no real surprise to those who’ve have been following it closely for more than a year. The renderings of the 2014 Corvette C7 from Jalopnik, Car & Driver, and others were strikingly close to the car unveiled Sunday.

But even though most of the renderings were surprisingly accurate, being able to see the real car added a ?finality??good or bad?to the passing of the torch to a new generation of Corvette. No longer can the traditionalists hope that the renderings were incorrect on the ?Camaroesque? tail lights, and that somehow, the traditional 

round quads would be revealed in the Motor City.

The renderings weren’t wrong.  

No longer can we hope the that a better ?orange? paint color would become available, it’s not. In fact, there’s no ?orange? for 2014?Texas and Tennessee fans, send your complaints to GM. 

But many hoped the ?Stingray? moniker would return, and it did?to an overwhelmingly positive public. The designers and engineers at GM have given us what we have so excitedly anticipated; the speculation on the C7 has been put to rest, and the seventh in a string of exciting Corvette generations is ours?what we saw Sunday is what we get! 

 I’m not going to rehash the hundreds of articles recapping every little detail of last Sunday evening. Suffice it to say, the initial response was overwhelmingly positive. The biggest surprise was how few surprises there were, and how close the renderings were to nailing much of the new car’s design. Some may think that General Motors North American President, Mark Reuss’s use of ?breathtaking? to describe the design may have been an exaggeration, but in perspective, I can’t think of a single word more appropriate for our new Corvette. 

Had we not been bombarded with hundreds of spy photos and leaks over the past year, few of us could have come up with a more accurate, word when the curtain was raised on the new ?Stingray.? Initial comments and reviews from the media privileged enough to see the car up close praised the design of the body and the interior. And the media reviews appear to reflect the overall response from first time viewers.  The results in one online poll were running 86% ?Love?, 9% ?Indifferent? and only 5% ?Hate?.

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