Corvette Named Best Car To Buy

The market for performance and luxury cars is changing. Electric vehicles such as the Porsche Taycan and Tesla Model S are making a play for buyers' dollars and enthusiasts' hearts with old-fashioned luxury and exhilarating acceleration enabled by electric motors and big batteries. The time will come when an electric car wins Motor Authority's Best Car To Buy award. That time was almost this year, but in the end traditional performance won out.

Some of our editors thought the redesigned mid-engine Corvette was a shoo-in for this year's award, but Editorial Director Marty Padgett challenged us to expand our definition of performance for the EV evolution underway. In this case, the Ford Mustang Mach-E provided the challenge. It may take on the form of a crossover SUV, but the Mustang name is more than just a marketing ploy. The Mach-E is quick and agile, and genuinely fun to drive.

But the Corvette is more fun to drive by a wide margin, and it's an outstanding value. Until the Mustang Mach-E comes with grippy summer tires, dinner-plate brakes, and track-ready cooling, it won't be able to win this award. That could come as early as this year with the arrival of the 580-horsepower GT model.

The Corvette offers all those traits, plus a sonorous V-8. Most importantly, it's the kind of car we want to own and drive. And the way it drives is what earned the Corvette the Best Car To Buy 2021 award.

Corvette engineers advocated for the change to the mid-engine layout to eke out the last bits of performance to make the Corvette as capable as European sports cars that cost three times as much. That required a Herculean engineering and tuning effort to create a well-balanced and engaging car, and the Corvette team was up to the task.

"It's one of those cars that almost reads your mind when you drive it," Motor Authority contributor Brian Wong said after a drive. "If I wanted the nose to dive in, it would. If I wanted to hang on the power and get it to move around a little in the back, it would." I experienced those traits in my first drive of the Corvette at Spring Mountain Motorsports Ranch in Pahrump, Nevada. The car turned in with immediacy and rotated willingly. The rear end was stable, and it needed to be coaxed to lose grip. Once there, however, it was easy to control and I could use the rear end to steer the car. A ride with an especially enthusiastic engineer revealed the C8 can be steered around a track almost exclusively with its rear wheels.

The new layout gives the Corvette better sight lines. The driver sits farther forward with a better view over the hood, which makes it easier to place the car on a track. The seat placement is closer to the car's center of mass, too, which Wong noted when he said, "It felt like it had a pole in the middle of it and it was just turning around it."

Read the entire story and see many more photos

Source: Kirk Bell - Motor Authority

Posted 2/19/21