[VIDEO] Bloomberg: Is the 2013 Corvette a Ferrari for the 99%?

Bloomberg auto columnist Jason Harper offers up some constructive criticism of the Chevrolet Corvette in a recent video.

Harper and a buddy took a Ferrari 458 and a new Corvette to the racetrack in Monticello in the Catskills, and they came away impressed with the American car.

“We drove the 458, which is an amazing car on the track, as you would expect,” Harper says, “and then I took the Corvette out. You know, the Corvette’s got some issues – it’s an older car, it looks a little cheesy, the interior’s terrible. And then I got it on the racetrack, and I remembered it’s a truly fantastic car. It is America’s supercar.”

As General Motors prepares for the seventh-generation Corvette due out as a 2014 model, Harper says he asked himself what are the things that aren’t working and what are the things that are about the current generation.

“And I’ll tell you what, on the racetrack, it is absolutely working!”

Harper says the current Corvette is “so much fun, it is so much fun to drive.”

But he says the interior is a little bit of the bad old GM. “I think we’re gonna see in the new generation, they are going to really step it up. (Right now) the leather’s a little not great, the interior looks a little cheesy, a little boy racer. It’s not as grownup as it probably should be to compete against some of the other cars it competes against, you know, some of the Audis and the BMWs.”

He wishes Chevrolet would take a page from Cadillac. “The Cadillac interiors are amazing,” Harper says. “If they would get something on that level with the new Corvette, I think a lot of the people buying European cars would come and take a look at the next-generation Corvette and realize that the car itself drives like the dickens. It is so fast and so fun that you know I got out of the Ferrari and into the Corvette and I didn’t even mind too much, you know.”

He says Corvette wins “again and again and again” against Ferrari in the American Le Mans Series.

“So I’d like them just to fix these couple of little things in the next generation, and we’ll remind everybody that it’s America’s supercar. … It can’t be that hard, yet it seems to be. It’s just that close.”

Source:
Bloomberg Businessweek

Related:
[VIDEO] Corvette ZR1 vs Cadillac V-Powered Wagon in Quarter Mile Drag Race
Bob Lutz: C7 Corvette is a “Much Bolder and More Dramatic Design”
[VIDEO] Why the C7 Corvette Needs Cadillac’s New CUE Infotainment System