FACT: You can’t steer a car without a steering wheel. Saab was wrong about joysticks back in the day. And since the new mid-engine 2020 C8 Chevrolet Corvette is a car people will want to steer, it follows that it will—it must—have a steering wheel. Now, you’re looking at it. Incredible!
Granted, we’ve seen this before. Since the new Corvette has been leakier than a C4 Corvette, the wheel has shown up in spy shots before. But General Motors itself put the official picture out today, ahead of the car’s real debut in Southern California next week.
So what’s new here? It’s a solid evolution from the outgoing C7's wheel, pictured below. The wheel looks more supercar-ish than ever before. It appears to be wider, has a flatter bottom, bears its volume buttons in a new location and has more pronounced spokes jutting off the central hub.
The paddles here are for changing gears up and down, as the only gearbox expected on the new Corvette is an eight-speed paddle-shift dual clutch. On the outgoing C7, on manual-transmission models, the paddles toggle rev matching on and off. I always thought that was an interesting use of paddles.
It’s worth saying the C7 was a quantum leap in interior quality over any previous Corvette, so it’ll be interesting to see how far the C8 takes that—and how much the price jumps to match these new features.
The rest of the Corvette drops next Thursday, July 18, if it doesn’t somehow leak out first.