It has been suggested that the future of the right-hand drive Chevrolet Corvette could be in danger.
Car Advice claims that GM’s executive director in charge of program management, Michele Braun, recently paused all future car and truck development, including for the Corvette, due to coronavirus lockdowns across the United States.
While this pause on development will be temporary, sources claim it means the Corvette won’t come to Australia during the first half of 2021 as originally planned. In addition, it may actually never come Down Under as it will likely be pushed down the priority queue when GM gets to the other side of the pandemic. If it does come, it won’t be until 2022 at the earliest.
Of course, it was not just Australia that was due to get the C8 Corvette in right-hand drive configuration as markets such as the UK and Japan were set to get it also. According to an unnamed industry source, GM may indeed scrap plans for a factory-built, right-hand drive Corvette altogether.
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“When General Motors comes out of this crisis, they will want to allocate their engineering resources to the vehicles that can deliver the biggest profits in the shortest possible time … they need cashflow urgently,” the source claims. “Do you really think General Motors is going to allocate engineers to finish off the right-hand-drive Corvette, when those same engineers could be working on another vehicle for the US market that will deliver much bigger profits and sell in much greater volumes?”
In an official comment provided to CarScoops, Holden had “no comment” on the report and we suggest taking Car Advice’s report with a grain of salt.
If the speculation is accurate, not all hope is lost just yet. Car Advice asserts GM could restart the right-hand drive Corvette program at a later date to coincide with the launch of new, higher-performance variants such the Corvette Grand Sport, Z06, and ZR1.
