The Corvette is a sports car first manufactured by Chevrolet in 1953 and is built today exclusively at a General Motors assembly plant in Bowling Green, Kentucky. It was the first all-American sports car built by an American car manufacturer. The National Corvette Museum is also located in Bowling Green, Kentucky.

The car is generally regarded as a “poor man’s supercar”, even though this description is intended to be flattering. Corvettes have a long history of melding outstanding handling and brutal amounts of engine power into a reasonably priced package that is radically less expensive than prestigious models with similar abilities. This has understandably led to some scorn of the Corvette by owners of such challenging marques, with most of the criticism being aimed at the Corvette’s level of modification. Older generations of the Corvette have been criticized for being rough when compared to European sports cars, although the C5 and C6 generations seem to have silenced all but the most strident of such critics.

Corvettes tend to highlight simplicity over technical complexity when it comes to engine power. Where nearly all rival models rely on smaller-displacement engines with complex, double overhead cams (DOHC), variable valve timing (VVT), four- and five-valve heads, or turbochargers, the Corvette makes just as much or better power using a simple overhead valve (OHV) head with only two pushrod-actuated valves per cylinder, coupled with a larger-displacement engine. The fairly simple pushrod V8 engine is lighter and physically smaller than the more complex arrangements, as well as cheaper to manufacture. This lack of sophistication is sometimes viewed as a negative by extreme automotive purists, and has fueled the aforementioned “lack of refinement” argument. Regardless of the validity of such criticism, no one can deny the power, efficiency, and affordability of the design.

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