BY Kyle Smith / ORIGINALLY PUBLISHED June 30, 2023 / HAGERTY What better birthday to celebrate right before America’s than the Corvette’s? 70 years ago,…{"id":12721,"date":"2023-07-14T08:43:19","date_gmt":"2023-07-14T15:43:19","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/www.pomonaswapmeet.com\/blog\/?p=12721"},"modified":"2023-07-14T08:43:19","modified_gmt":"2023-07-14T15:43:19","slug":"70-years-ago-the-first-corvette-was-born","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/www.pomonaswapmeet.com\/blog\/2023\/07\/14\/70-years-ago-the-first-corvette-was-born\/","title":{"rendered":"70 years ago, the first Corvette was born"},"content":{"rendered":"
BY Kyle Smith \/ ORIGINALLY PUBLISHED June 30, 2023 \/ HAGERTY<\/h5>\n

What better birthday to celebrate right before America\u2019s than the Corvette\u2019s? 70 years ago, the first example of America\u2019s sports car rolled out of the factory in Flint, Michigan.<\/p>\n

Building that first car was an interesting process. The Ford Model T might have brought the production line to popularity 45 years earlier, but the first Corvette was hand-assembled. Workers at the Flint factory took the parts, pieces, and materials and painstakingly combined them into a functional automobile. That 1953 model was equipped with a Blue Flame<\/a> inline-six engine mated to a two-speed Powerglide transmission\u2014ironic, considering how many of the Corvette faithful consider the lack of three pedals in the eighth and latest generation to be an atrocity.<\/p>\n

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No matter how polarizing that drivetrain might be now, it was the Corvette\u2019s body construction, not its transmission, that made waves at the time. Fiberglass was best known as a boat hull material; it was not yet widely used for car production<\/a>.<\/p>\n

Chevrolet\u2019s fiberglass molds shaped a curvy little roadster, complete with plastic curtains, instead of windows, that snapped into place. All 1953 Corvettes were sprayed Polo White, with interiors upholstered in red. Despite the lack of color options, it took two days to assemble the first models. For comparison, it takes the Corvette factory in Bowling Green, Kentucky,<\/a> three shifts to build a C8\u2014roughly, a day and a half. Considering how much the Corvette has changed since those very simple, white-wall-tire cars of the \u201950s, let alone how many more options are on the C8\u2019s build sheet, that pace is pretty darn impressive.<\/p>\n

What the Corvette would become could have only been a dream for those early owners. A new C8 Z06<\/a> can clear a quarter-mile at 131 mph before a 1953 Corvette has even reached 60 mph. What or where will the Corvette be next is certainly a great debate, but one thing is clear: Few American cars have such a beloved, long-running lineage.<\/p>\n

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This article has been reproduced with the permission of the copyright holder, Hagerty. Further reproduction is prohibited without permission. Click here for more\u00a0automotive tips and stories<\/a><\/strong>, or here for more information on\u00a0the next Pomona Swap Meet & Classic Car Show<\/a><\/strong>.<\/em><\/div>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":null,"protected":false},"author":103,"featured_media":12722,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"cos_headline_score":0,"cos_seo_score":0,"cos_headline_text":"","cos_headline_has_been_analyzed":false,"cos_last_analyzed_headline":[],"_jetpack_memberships_contains_paid_content":false,"footnotes":""},"categories":[136],"tags":[7519,7611,7610,435,7560,55,18,2532,7609,7608,1566,7607],"aioseo_notices":[],"jetpack_featured_media_url":"https:\/\/i0.wp.com\/www.pomonaswapmeet.com\/blog\/wp-content\/uploads\/2023\/07\/1953-Chevrolet-Corvette-Assembly-04-e1673896164484.jpg-copy.jpg?fit=1200%2C804&ssl=1","jetpack_shortlink":"https:\/\/wp.me\/p9nnZN-3jb","jetpack_sharing_enabled":true,"jetpack_likes_enabled":true,"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.pomonaswapmeet.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/12721"}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.pomonaswapmeet.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.pomonaswapmeet.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.pomonaswapmeet.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/103"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.pomonaswapmeet.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=12721"}],"version-history":[{"count":6,"href":"https:\/\/www.pomonaswapmeet.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/12721\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":12729,"href":"https:\/\/www.pomonaswapmeet.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/12721\/revisions\/12729"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.pomonaswapmeet.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/12722"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.pomonaswapmeet.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=12721"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.pomonaswapmeet.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=12721"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.pomonaswapmeet.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=12721"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}