We've seen the new Corvette Stingray indoors, but this is the first time we're seeing it on the road, in the real world. Does it look…better?
I myself have seen the 2014 Corvette in person and touched its very sculpted (too sculpted?) body panels. But when I saw the car, I saw it under harsh indoor lights and in the bland, featureless setting of the Detroit Auto Show.
Now, with great thanks to a Jalopnik reader in Arizona, I'm seeing the car in two new colors (black and blue) and I'm seeing them out in the sun, under a blue sky. I think they look better than they did at the show. The black Stingray in particular looks especially resolved, and still has a bit of a concept car air about its proportions.
The four exhausts still look ridiculous, but in a kind of good way, like Chevy put a two-year-old in charge of Corvette exhaust design. If the pipes were shaped like rocket ships or sharks, we wouldn't be surprised.
Critically, though, we can see how the light plays on the body panels and makes the Stingray look especially thin and light, something that's lacking in the last two darlings of America's youth, the Veyron and the GT-R, yet is very much present in a current design favorite, the Audi A7. You hardly notice the Stingray's many vents, or the weird way that only the C-pillar is body-colored on the blue car.
Now that these things are even tangentially on the road in undisguised form, we expect it's only a matter of hours before we see them streetracing a Lamborghini or a Nissan. Sigh.
(Hat Tip and photo credits to Ramon!)