The Drive 🤝 your inbox. Every weekday
The Daily Brief wraps up the biggest stories and our exclusive reporting on the auto industry and car culture.
What’s in store for the C9 Corvette? Chevy is still putting the finishing touches on the C8 lineup, but now that we have the full lineup in showrooms, we can’t help but wonder what’s coming next. So when we had the opportunity to interview Corvette chief engineer Tony Roma, we jumped at the chance to ask about the future of the program, and he was surprisingly candid about what the company thinks the C9 should and shouldn’t be.
“The C9 needs to be a Corvette at its core,” Roma told us. “It needs to have value; we would obviously try to improve the performance over the C8, and that goes to the value offer the customer something more than what they have in their current car.”
Roma rejects the notion that Corvette needs to target a higher price point in order to compete.
“Even though we’re a mid-engine car now, there’s a lot of people that think that means we need to go chase Lamborghini and Ferrari tit-for-tat,” Roma said. “That’s not the core of what a Corvette is.”
“We just happened to move the engine to the back for reasons based in first-principle physics, right, of putting the weight over the drive wheels, and I think all the performance metrics show the car is just faster, better,” Roma continued. “We were able to maintain the ride comfort that people came to expect from all the previous generation Corvettes.”
“So yeah, you can expect we’ll just do what we do, only better, newer, faster,” Roma said.
And “faster” likely means sticking with a dual-clutch transmission, even if Roma himself would prefer that the Corvette be offered with a stickshift. The problem? As always, cost.
“Transmissions are super expensive,” Roma explained. “When we had C5, C6, and C7, we could use basically the same manual transmission architecture that had been around and slowly developed over like 30 years, and it was mostly paid for and we were doing slight upgrades on it and it cost reasonable amounts of money to keep it in production.”
With the C8, all of that investment had to be thrown out the window.
“We moved the engine to the back, we’ve now got this transaxle that’s fantastic, it can handle an insane amount of torque from an LT7, and so now I’d have to go develop something all new,” Roma said. “And that’s tricky because the proportions of the car are based around from the front of the engine is right up against the back of the front seats to the centerline of the axle means there’s nothing in the world to buy, I have to go make one, and that’s a really, really expensive thing.”
What of Tremec’s aftermarket gearbox? Roma appreciates the work that has gone into it, but he’s skeptical that it’s something that would be viable in production. He’s even previously gone on record saying that he doesn’t really believe in it. Why?
“I wish they wouldn’t have made it sound like it was so easy,” he told us. “They made it sound like, ‘Oh look, this could drop right in and you could do this.’
But as Roma points out, nobody seems to have put one in an actual car yet.
“I still haven’t seen one, maybe they’ve built one, I don’t know. Certainly you could, with CNC machines and enough money, you could certainly do that,” he said. “For us to do it means it’s got to be validated and all of that, and become real, and I’ve got to certify it for emissions, and blah blah blah.”
“They implied to the world, like, ‘Look, we solved Chevy’s problem. The only thing they couldn’t figure out how to do was make a transmission.’ Well, okay, hold on, like, that wasn’t the hard part, you know?”
There is certainly demand for manual gearboxes, which Roma acknowledges as part of a larger, cyclical trend in the auto industry.
“When everybody else had manual transmissions, luxury meant the first Ferrari F1-shifted automated manuals and some of the things those competitors were doing,” he explained “That meant ‘Look, mine’s cooler than yours, I can have something you can’t have.’ Now that most of the mainstream market’s gone DCT or otherwise, now it’s the other way.”
But as it stands the added cost would be antithetical to Corvette’s goal of delivering on value.
“I would love it as a driver, as a customer, I would love it. I just don’t know if we can make it make sense,” he told us.
Got a story tip? Let us know at tips@thedrive.com!
Add The Drive as a preferred source on Google to see more of our reporting.
Byron is an editor at The Drive with a keen eye for infrastructure, sales and regulatory stories.
