It’s Official! MotorTrend Names the Corvette the Most Iconic Car of the Past 75 Years

When MotorTrend began its search for the Most Iconic Car of the Past 75 Years, was there any doubt which model its readers would choose via an online poll?

Not on this website, and ultimately not on the World Wide Web, either.

Yes, the Chevrolet Corvette has earned yet another honor, and this time it wasn’t just the hotter-than-a-firecracker, mid-engine eighth-generation cars strutting up to the podium.

It was all eight generations, beginning with the 150-horsepower “Blue Flame” inline-six model that debuted with just 300 cars in 1953 and continuing all the way through the current flat-plane crank Z06 that has truly become a world supercar.

As MotorTrend points out:

Chevy has sold more than 1.8 million Corvettes over the past 71 years, eight generations, and two powertrain layouts. They’ve come with automatic, manual, and dual-clutch transmissions offering anywhere from two to eight ratios. Under the hood of the various production cars and concepts, there have been pushrod inline-sixes, pushrod and dual-overhead-cam V-8s, superchargers, turbochargers, a hybrid system, and even rotary engines. They’ve been featured in countless movies, TV shows, songs, and magazine covers, and they’ve been owned by more celebrities than we can list up to and including our current president. They’ve been everything from racing champions to world-beating supercars to the preferred ride of the white-tank-top-and-gold-chain set and of white New Balance and jorts aficionados everywhere.

Chevy’s sports car, which grew from humble beginnings at the Waldorf Astoria Hotel in New York City, “is everywhere you look in American pop-culture history over the past 75 years,” MotorTrend explains, being the topic of songs by everybody from The Beach Boys to George Jones to Prince as well as the car of choice for entertainment icons like Sam Malone on Cheers and Barbie throughout her career.

But the Corvette truly earned its stripes on the race track, where a factory car has paced the Indy 500 a record 21 times and the factory-backed Corvette Racing team has since 1999 won the 24 Hours of Le Mans nine times, Rolex 24 Hours of Daytona four times, American Le Mans Series championship 10 times, IMSA WeatherTech SportsCar Championship five times, and FIA World Endurance Championship once.

Actually, it really shouldn’t come as a surprise that the Corvette would earn this latest title, considering it’s been MotorTrend’s Car of the Year three times (1984, 1998, and 2020) and has been on the magazine’s cover a whopping 114 times, 90 of them since 1983.

Congratulations to the entire Corvette team, past and present, and to the millions of enthusiasts who have helped it become the Most Iconic Car of the Past 75 Years!

Source:
MotorTrend

Related:
MotorTrend: Corvette SUV and a Concept EV to be Revealed in 2024
[VIDEO] MotorTrend Adds the 2023 Corvette Z06 to its Long-Term Test Fleet
The C8 Corvette Stingray is Named MotorTrend’s Car of the Year

Subscribe Now: