GM announced it opened a new advanced design studio outside Birmingham, UK — and showed a bit of what it’s working on.
Automakers’ design studios tend to crank out futuristic and fantastic concepts at a remarkable rate, and General Motors announced this week it was expanding its footprint to bring more globally-sourced car designs into the zeitgeist. One such concept emerged from its new Royal Leamington Spa studio (what a name for a town, by the way): a Chevrolet Corvette with wildly flamboyant hypercar looks, gullwing doors and a central spine inspired by the “split-window” 1963 Stingray, which GM calls the “Apex Vision” here.
From the lights to the fenders to the doors to the extreme aerodynamics, this concept kicks off a trio of Corvette concepts the studio plans to reveal this year (we’ll see the other two later). This UK studio is led by veteran designer Julian Thomson, who designed the original S1 Lotus Elise, with a more than 30-strong team dedicated to digital and physical clay model development. Thomson’s tenure also includes stints at Ford, Volkswagen Group and Jaguar.
The Leamington studio expands on GM’s existing Detroit, Los Angeles, Shanghai and Seoul design centers.
This particular Corvette concept measures out about the same length as a C8 Corvette, but is about 5 inches wider (at 85.7 inches) and about 8 inches shorter in overall height (at just 40.7 inches). GM says the upper half of the body pays homage to classic Corvette design cues like the split windows or the fenders from the C3 and the modern C8 models. The lower end, on the other hand, throws tradition to the wind and focuses more on the technical aspects of modern sports car design. That includes everybody’s favorite evolutionary trait: EV battery technology embedded into the structural and aerodynamic elements of the car.
So…we’re getting an electric Corvette, then?
In its release, GM only mentions electrification that one time, and the overall proportions seem to lean toward the notion of an electric sports car, rather than something packing a good-old American V8 behind the driver and passenger. The automaker also mentions the aerodynamic profile aiding efficiency and range, as well as on-track agility.
That said, this is strictly a concept, and some of these elements won’t come anywhere near an eventual production C9 Corvette. It’s entirely plausible — even likely, given the current state of affairs around the car industry — that we’ll see a next-generation Corvette in a “multi-energy” context. That is, GM may co-develop both an internal combustion and an electric (or at least hybridized) version of the new Corvette in parallel, possibly utilizing a common platform.
At the moment, the current C8 Corvette is readying its sixth model year in production, so odds are we’ll see a new model sooner rather than later. Definitely, we’ll see the C9 closer to production-spec form (after the two additional concepts this year) before the end of the decade. Word has it we’ll see more on the concepts at this summer’s Goodwood Festival of Speed (again, makes sense given the UK design studio), with the actual C9 you’ll be able to buy due out in 2028.
