Competition Seats? Check. New Engine? Wait What? Stingray Fails
Wooomp Woooomp WAAAAW. That’s the noise coming from Car and Driver’s brand new Corvette Stingray long termer. Well it was coming from the car for a while. But let’s start at the beginning of this tale of woe.
Car and Driver, like many more prestigious publications gets the manufacturers to loan them a few cars a year to have as long term testers. This enables the journalists to not just spend a few days or weeks with the car, but to really see what the car is like to live with. Essentially, they find out all of the little foibles, noises, and issues a car has within a set mileage.
It helps the consumer make a more informed decision when purchasing a car especially when the testers have something go wrong. Enter the Car and Driver Corvette. At 6,000 miles, the brand new car’s LT1 V8 had a catastrophic engine failure. Or in other words, the engine blew up.
Now before you say that the testers were hard launching, or drifting, or a whole host of other bad driving techniques and that’s why it blew, they were. I’m not going to deny that they TESTED THE CAR. That is their job. But the problem didn’t stem from them beating the car into submission, but rather came down to a faulty oil filter that allowed metal particulates into the engine and subsequently ripped the internals to shreds.
Apparently there were a few more issues with the car that sidelined the car through much of its service at Car and Driver as well. However, the writers there still love to death the new Stingray and Chevy replaced every single piece that broke since it was still under warranty. And Chevy will even fix yours too now that the problem is known.
I’m in with the Car and Driver camp, I love the Stingray. My brief time with it was all too short and would love to get my hands on another one, but are these issues going to prevent you from getting one, or are these tiny enough not to care about?