And not single cars that were recalled under the lemon laws so often they could be squeezed for their juice. Not one-off customs where some individual indulged his atrocious taste to a disastrous end. An automatic transmission was a required option with the larger 400 and 454 CID V8s.These are the 10 worst Corvettes of all time. Both came standard with a three-speed manual transmission and the 350 CID V8. Those from 1955-68 may have electric overdrive.The hardtop coupe had a base price of 3,880 and the Landau listed for 2,130. Units from 1940-54 have enclosed driveline, otherwise known as a 'torque tube'.To read about the 10 Best Corvettes of All Time, click here.Here's credit to both Chevrolet and Callaway for having the brass balls to build a twin-turbocharged and twin-intercooled version of the Corvette way back in 1987. And relatively speaking, almost any Corvette is better than almost any ordinary car.Almost. If there was one long list of all the production Corvettes that started with the greatest ever at the top and finished with the least great at the bottom, this is just reading from the bottom up.That took the base C4 Corvette coupe from its $27,999 base price to $47,998.That may look like a bargain price to 21st-century eyes, but the twin-turbo was notoriously fragile. It was available through Chevy dealers using the Regular Production Option (RPO) code B2K.As a $19,999 option, B2K included new forged pistons and a secondary fuel injection system to keep the 382-horsepower turbo motor fed. But — and you knew that word was coming — these early Callaways simply didn't hold together when they were, well, driven.Incidentally yes, the Callaway Twin Turbo was a production Chevrolet.
![]() Price Of A 76 Chevrolet Transmission Manual Transmission AndA total of 527 of these were made and that's not a lot of cars. But they looked like white cars that a couple of lunatics in the GM design studio had drawn all over with Magic Markers.Purple is a color that has never flattered the Corvette — or the top half of a Corvette. So even though B2K was available through the 1991 model year, only about 500 were ordered.There was nothing mechanically awful about the 527 replicas built of the Corvette Convertible that paced the 1995 running of the Indianapolis 500. And there was a big chrome toothy grille with smaller chrome openings on either side of it. And more chrome strips running down the trunk lid. Then there were chrome strips that ran from those headlights across the top of the front fenders. Then they added fake louvers on the hood and more chrome.This was the first Corvette with four headlights — and those were set in chrome frames. And he and his stylists decorated it and decorated it and then over-decorated it. The leather upholstery was white. Glaringly, blazingly, blindingly white.While the roof was kept black, practically everything else on the Commemorative Edition was white. This thing was almost as much chrome as it was fiberglass.Earl retired from GM in 1958 to be replaced by Bill Mitchell, who immediately started pulling chrome and louvers off the 1959 Corvette.The first 1953 Corvettes were all painted Polo White, so when it came time to celebrate the car's 35th anniversary, someone at GM decided a special white version of the C4 Corvette coupe was in order. And three chrome spears in the cove along the car's flanks. Despite being a pitiable pile of loosely associated plastic, it sold like crazy. Meanwhile the interior was a relentless, hideous monochrome that extended the disco-era upholstery colors onto the door panels and dashboard.But here's the most frustrating thing about the 1979 Corvette. But in 1979, the car was naked and the suck showed.The base L48 version of the 1979 Corvette had a 5.7-liter V8 that made only 195 hp, barely enough to keep the 3,372-pound lump moving. But in 1978 you could get the great-looking black-and-silver Indy 500 pace car or silver Silver Anniversary editions, and that made it easy to overlook how otherwise decrepit the C3 Corvette had become. And the Collector Edition was the first Corvette to cost more than $20,000.From the outside, the 1979 Corvette is almost indistinguishable from the 1978 edition. In sum, it was decorated like the boudoir of a Tatooine madam. Whoever signed off on this rolling monument to bad taste should have been hanged, or better yet, forced to drive one. It was painted an even more repulsive shade of purple and then it got worse.Since the designers had used all their Magic Markers on the '95 model, they stole some highlighters from accounting to finish off the stripes, upholstery and wheels on the '98 model. That does not say good things about the state of 1979 America.There's only one thing that makes the 1995 Corvette pace car less hideous — and that is the 1998 Corvette Pace Car. So this is the best-selling Corvette ever made. Xbox 360 xex menu 14That's right: a lousy, lazy 180-hp, 5.0-liter lump of small-block agony. So if you wanted a new Corvette that year in Los Angeles or San Francisco or Sacramento, you had to settle for one with a 305-cubic-inch V8 and a three-speed automatic transmission. But in California it was doubly awful, as Chevrolet that year gave up trying to certify the Corvette's 350-cubic-inch V8 for that state's more stringent emissions requirements. Inflation was rampant, the economy was in the doldrums and the Corvette was awful. Consistency, after all, is the hobgoblin of little minds.Corners were cut to get the '53 Corvette into production. And yes, it's also on our 10 Greatest Corvettes list. It was a year that sucked.Yes, this is the first Corvette. After all, the base "L48" 350 was only rated at 190 hp and opting for the "L82" high-performance version only netted 230 hp. The production of the fiberglass 108-piece bodies was something no one anywhere had done before on such a large scale — and only rarely did everything fit together. And, notoriously, the only transmission available was a two-speed Powerglide automatic.The big problems, though, came in actually building those first Corvettes. The engine was the old Blue Flame six with mechanical lifters and a compression ratio boost to 8.0:1 to produce a modest 150 hp. That's 32 less than the base 2.5-liter four in a 2013 Malibu sedan. Most 1975 Corvettes had engines that made only 165 hp. But when the 1975 Corvette came along, the big block was gone and the base "ZQ3" 350 had lost a half point of compression and gained a catalytic converter, which dropped its output to a paltry 165 hp.That's right. And even the base 350-cubic-inch (5.7-liter) small-block V8 was still gross rated at 250 hp. That is, when it decided to roll at all.In 1974 it was still possible to get a Corvette with a big block, 270-hp, "LS4" 454-cubic-inch V8. The first Corvettes were, simply and comprehensively, crude.So the first Corvette was both great and lousy: a rolling contradiction. Heroin 8 ball priceAt least the Bricklin was even slower.Yes, there was an upgraded L82 engine option in '75, but it didn't enter production until deep into the model year and was strangled by an exhaust system that used a single catalytic converter.
0 Comments
Leave a Reply. |
AuthorSara ArchivesCategories |