[VIDEO] 2024 Corvette E-Ray: The Strangest Electrified Sports Car Yet!

One of the YouTubers we’ve really come to enjoy is Marques Brownlee and his channel for car reviews called “Auto Focus“. From my understanding, he got his start years ago doing phone reviews and has now branched off into other areas like autos. It was his E-Ray reveal video back in January 2023 that first introduced us to Marques, and we find his take on the new E-Ray be very refreshing.

Marques calls the E-Ray “one of the weirdest hybrids” and in the review he calls out some quirks and other weird stuff, but he’s not denigrating the car while doing it, and at the end of the review he talks about the E-Ray being the friendliest daily driver Corvette ever offered and despite the possible downsides, he would choose the E-Ray over all other C8s.

One of the reasons why the E-Ray is one of the weirdest hybrids that he has tested is because all those others want to improve gas mileage or provide as much range as possible, while the Corvette E-Ray is designed to provide the best possible performance. And because of that, he calls the E-Ray the move livable Corvette, especially as they are equipped with the all-season Michelin’s direct from the factory. “That’s the biggest statement you can make shipping a car from the factory with all-season tires which is hey, ‘we want you to drive this thing all year round.'”

Another “strange” feature of the E-Ray is its Stealth Mode which enables the driver to start up and drive on pure electrical power from the front-mounted motor. Under Stealth Mode you can drive speeds up to 45 mph before it switches over to the primary drive system featuring the 6.2L LT2 V8 engine in the rear, but you can only do it from start-up and not while you’re driving the car. And once you’ve reached the limits of Stealth Mode, it goes through a complicated flying start up. He says:

“It does this whole spinning up, syncing process again because the front and rear axles are not talking to each other. It’s got to figure out how fast you’re going, fire up the engine, sync everything, get the RPMs matched, and then have everything turn on. It’s really bizarre and it works…a sub-quirk of this car is Stealth Mode is not available under 50° Fahrenheit.”

He finds that to be a sub-quirk that you can’t start the car in Stealth Mode at less than 50 degrees, and we checked the 2024 Owner’s Manual to confirm that was the case. However, another sub-sub-quirk with that is that Shuttle Mode (the other battery-only propulsion mode) allows the temps to get down to 14° Fahrenheit. That’s most likely due to how Chevy has programmed the E-Ray batteries for rapid discharging and recharging, and most lithium batteries don’t like to be cold when you charge them. Speaking of the battery, Marques also finds it “shockingly how fast” the Charge+ button works to refill the battery when that feature is enabled.

“Put it all together and what do you get? You get the E-Ray, which I don’t even know if it will be the most popular Corvette in this C8 lineup, but I do think if you look at every single one in the lineup as far as which one people decide to daily Drive every single day, it should be this one. This is the one that makes the most sense in the winter. It’s got the all-season tires, it’s got all-wheel drive, and it is still super quick and still sounds really really good!”

Source:
Auto Focus

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