January 17, 1953 The Corvette's Debut

[Nitro]

The Rover jet car;
View attachment 73993

It actually doesn't look too bad. It was based around an existing production car.

I could do without the third headlamp

 

[maycontainthunder]

I could do without the third headlamp

They are nicknamed Cyclops Rovers because of that. My uncle had a conventional one of these back in the fifties.

 

[Sherlock77]

Here in North America, Chrysler also experimented with turbine concept cars...

 

[Sherlock77]

They are nicknamed Cyclops Rovers because of that. My uncle had a conventional one of these back in the fifties.

They are nicknamed Cyclops Rovers because of that. My uncle had a conventional one of these back in the fifties.

The original Rover P4 sedans in the early 1950's did have a grille like that, by the mid 50's it was the same grille but minus that third light in the grille

 

[Sherlock77]

Here in the UK we had British Leyland. They turned cars ugly while introducing new models that consistently feature in the top ten worst cars in British history.

Here is a nice Marina, sold in Canada as the Austin Marina... But this one did rack up almost 300K mileage by the longtime owner... I knew the man who owned this one, he was still driving it around Calgary back in 2011, I think the only car he owned...

 

[maycontainthunder]

Here is a nice Marina, sold in Canada as the Austin Marina... But this one did rack up almost 300K mileage by the longtime owner... I knew the man who owned this one, he was still driving it around Calgary back in 2011, I think the only car he owned...

For the majority of my life there was a Hillman Imp next door. This was a really early one from October 1963. Single family ownership since it was six months old. It still wears most of it's original paint and the only non-original panel is the hood because it had a rust hole in it despite being garaged it's whole life. Sadly the owner passed away and her daughter now has it. When last heard of she was having the original engine rebuilt.

I know of a motorcycle in the village that was bought new in 1955 and is still only one owner from new.

 

[tkcartoonist]

Back to the Vette, I find it amazing that from 1968 to 1982, other than the interior consoles and stuff under the hood, the styling didn't change at all. That's a long time to keep the same body on a vehicle. I should also mention that there is an '83 Vette, but there's only one and it's in a museum. It looks just like the '84 Vette though.

 

[Nitro]

Back to the Vette, I find it amazing that from 1968 to 1982, other than the interior consoles and stuff under the hood, the styling didn't change at all. That's a long time to keep the same body on a vehicle. I should also mention that there is an '83 Vette, but there's only one and it's in a museum. It looks just like the '84 Vette though.

This post explains why that happened:

Here's an interesting piece of General Motors trivia.
An autoworkers strike forced GM to pull office workers who were not union to work the assembly lines.
That in turn lead their design department to make subtle changes to the trim work and they began to outsource parts to built their vehicles.
That in turn sort of took another turn of negative events on the union workers as accounting found out it cost less to do it that way.
In the end, the 1972 cars were just modified versions of the prior years and were really supposed to look like the ones built in '73