Chevy Is Already Doing Concepts for the Next Corvette

Corvettes have long been designed and built in the United States. They’re as American as hot dog pie and baseball sandwiches. But the next-generation Corvette’s design may have dual citizenship, as its design could come from just outside Birmingham, England. And if it does, it’s going to look like a mid-engine sci-fi hypercar.

GM recently opened a new design studio in Royal Leamington Spa, a town 20 miles outside Birmingham, as part of the Detroit giant’s global design project to imagine the next-generation Corvette. The man in charge of GM’s U.K. design studio, and who’s been tasked with pitching a Corvette design, is Julian Thompson, a former Lotus, Jaguar, and Land Rover designer. You might not know him by name, but you know his work, as he worked on some of the prettiest Jags on the road, including the XK and F-Type. Thompson leads a team of 30 designers in the 24,584-square-foot U.K. studio, who were tasked with coming up with the look of a Corvette of the future.

The Corvette has always been the everyman’s sports car; something with world-beating performance but also something that the Average Joe could save up to afford. However, for this new project, GM asked a few design studios to come up with a hypercar version, something that pushed boundaries, and that’s what you’re looking at.

As much as GM and Thompson say that this concept is meant to take elements of the Corvette’s history to inspire the future of design, that didn’t seem to happen here. Take the checkered-flag badge off the front end, and you might think this was an electric car concept from Lotus or maybe even an upstart like Rimac. The only design element seemingly taken from Corvette history is the C2-inspired split window, which Thompson and his team added to both the front and rear windows, instead of just the rear like on the original. The split front window is something Thompson calls its “Apex Vision,” and the central spine that splits the windows is said to be a structural component.

Since it’s an electric hypercar concept, it has an ultra-low and narrow passenger tunnel, with the wheels pushed out wide. Between the wheels and the main chassis of the car are massive aerodynamic air inlets and it features powered, gullwing doors. I’m not sure it looks anything like a Corvette as we know it, but it’s pretty cool.

If GM can somehow manage to take this hypercar concept look and scale it down to be as affordable as the Corvette always has been, it could be one of the more exciting electric sports cars in the world. It might not feel like a traditional ‘Vette, but neither did the C8, and it could be the best one of them all.

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