I am pretty sure people will notice a guy wearing a ridiculously large Lakers shirt and huge baggy pants in downtown Milan, Italy; Same thing with American manufacturers in the supercars industry. I know you will be probably saying that I might have overlooked the Ford Mustang, well I didn’t and what I have just said still applies on that ridiculous car. Sorry Uncle Sam!
Those who have been bored enough to read my articles in the past 2 years know that I have a very radical opinion when it comes to American cars. I never found them sexy enough; I mean they do call some of their cars “muscle cars”. Well, I don’t find a lady with Arnold sized biceps attractive.
However, today Yankees are trying to keep up with the technology of the automotive industry; a technology that the Europeans and Japanese are mastering well! In an attempt to do so, Chevrolet released the new Corvette Stingray. They hope by this car to set a new standard and raise the bar for the power/engineering ratio. So as merciful as I am I thought why not give it a shot!
The New Corvette Stingray is of course powered by a 6.2 Litters, 460 Horsepower, 450 N.m of torque engine that has pushrods. It utilizes a 7 speed automatic gearbox to deliver this power to the tires. So far so good! The car has definitely the looks of a supercar and unlike the old model, it actually sounds like one. Once inside the car you will start feeling the coolness, the supercar coolness. The car has racing written all over the place.
However, once you turn the computers, one disappointment starts to fill your lungs. For God’s sakes, they made it a decision-making nightmare instead of a straight forward fun machine. The stability and driving dynamics system has 5 options: Economy, Track, Touring, Sport and Wet weather. That’s one half of a morning hour wasted to decide from 1 to 10 (1 being boring, 10 hot and exciting) how you will want to spend your day. Not to mention the subsystems that need an engineer to set it up for you before you leave your garage with regret; telemetry that measures how many revs your car had made during its life, steering response settings and a differential that auto adjusts according to the tires temperature. Why would I want that in a car?! Who cares?!
Honestly, they had so much effort invested in these technologies, in an attempt to build a car to compete with the European and Japanese makers that they end-up competing with the new PlayStation 4. The Yankees did it again; same mistake when they spent millions of dollars to develop a pen that works in 0-gravity for their astronauts while the Russians gave their guys a pencil. Again, sorry Uncle Sam!