The Chevrolet Corvette is a sports car that has been manufactured by Chevrolet since 1953. It is built today exclusively at a General Motors assembly plant in Bowling Green, Kentucky, U.S.A.. 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.
For more than 50 years, Corvettes have combined very powerful engines and affordability, especially when compared with more prestigious marques of similar performance. Older generations of the Corvette have been criticized for being crude and lacking in refinement by European sports car standards, and their on-limit handling is a divisive issue garnering both praise and reproach.[1] Recent generations of the Corvette, however, are widely seen as being much improved in these areas.[2]
Corvettes tend to emphasize simplicity over technical complexity. Where nearly all competing marques rely on smaller displacement, more complex and faster-revving engines, the Corvette uses a simpler overhead valve (OHV) design coupled with a larger displacement to make up for the lower rev limit pushrods impose. The result is usually cheaper to manufacture and maintain. Another example of this philosophy is the continued use of transverse leaf springs in the suspension. This is judged as a lack of sophistication by some automotive purists, and has fueled the aforementioned "lack of refinement" argument, although the Corvette's units differ substantially from traditional leaf springs, being made of a composite material and arranged in such a way as to act as stabilizer bars.