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What Makes the Chevrolet Corvette Appealing?
April 6, 2013, 12:01 AM
By Dan Neil
Wall Street Journal
PEOPLE THROW around the word “icon” but rarely think what it means for a culture to spontaneously decide that something is sacred. As of 2013, the phrase “Chevrolet Corvette” has been in the lexicon for 60 years, and somehow this product from the Chevrolet division of General Motors, this widget, has become an object of veneration for lots of people in varying states of excitement and delusion.
Why? Let’s resist, if we can, jingoism: “America’s Sports Car,” etc. And let’s be wary of nostalgia. The good old days of Buz and Tod, and Buzz and Neil, weren’t all that good. The Corvette catalog includes at least two decades of mediocre cars, and this now-much-ballyhooed nameplate of Chevrolet barely survived GM’s recent bankruptcy.
Yet when Chevrolet unveiled the seventh-generation Corvette (the C7) at the Detroit auto show in January, people went crazy, an entire culture checked in. Clearly, we’re invested.
Full Story: What Makes the Chevrolet Corvette Appealing? - Driver's Seat - WSJ
April 6, 2013, 12:01 AM
By Dan Neil
Wall Street Journal
PEOPLE THROW around the word “icon” but rarely think what it means for a culture to spontaneously decide that something is sacred. As of 2013, the phrase “Chevrolet Corvette” has been in the lexicon for 60 years, and somehow this product from the Chevrolet division of General Motors, this widget, has become an object of veneration for lots of people in varying states of excitement and delusion.
Why? Let’s resist, if we can, jingoism: “America’s Sports Car,” etc. And let’s be wary of nostalgia. The good old days of Buz and Tod, and Buzz and Neil, weren’t all that good. The Corvette catalog includes at least two decades of mediocre cars, and this now-much-ballyhooed nameplate of Chevrolet barely survived GM’s recent bankruptcy.
Yet when Chevrolet unveiled the seventh-generation Corvette (the C7) at the Detroit auto show in January, people went crazy, an entire culture checked in. Clearly, we’re invested.
Full Story: What Makes the Chevrolet Corvette Appealing? - Driver's Seat - WSJ
