GM's new sports car exceeds 1,000 horsepower

DETROIT — General Motors' The new Chevrolet Corvette will be the most powerful version of the American sports car ever produced, and it's not even close.

The Detroit automaker said Thursday that the 2025 Chevy Corvette ZR1 will be powered by a 5.5-liter twin-turbocharged V8 engine capable of generating more than 1,000 horsepower (a first for a Corvette) and 828 pound-feet of torque, putting it among the ranks of supercars that can cost hundreds of thousands of dollars.

“This car pulls like a freight train,” said Tadge Juechter, Corvette's executive chief engineer since 2006, during a media event. “We expect this car to be, in essence, the fastest car we've ever built, by a long shot.”

The previous most powerful Corvette was GM's latest ZR1 for the 2019 model year. It made 755 horsepower and 715 pound-feet of torque from a 6.2-liter supercharged V8 engine.

Juechter said the new ZR1 will “comfortably” have a higher top speed than the Corvette's previous top speed of 212 mph.

GM said pricing for the 2025 Corvette ZR1, which includes an additional “ZTK” performance package, will be announced closer to the vehicle’s production date next year. The 2019 Corvette ZR1 had a starting price of $121,000.

The ZR1 joins what GM calls the “Corvette family,” which includes the “everyman's sports car” Corvette Stingray, which starts at about $70,000; the E-Ray hybrid; and the Z06 race car, priced at about $112,000.

“We're pleased with the outcome. This is the next step in that whole approach,” said Brad Franz, Chevy's director of marketing for cars and crossovers.

GM has already confirmed that an all-electric Corvette will be launched, but has not given a timeline. A Corvette SUV has also been under consideration for several years. Franz declined to comment on either vehicle.

Wall Street analysts have said GM could better leverage the Corvette brand by expanding models and, to some extent, sales. In late 2019, Morgan Stanley analyst Adam Jonas said a Corvette sub-brand could be worth between $7 billion and $12 billion.

Chevrolet Corvette sales totaled approximately 34,500 vehicles in each of the past two years. In 2019, the automaker redefined the iconic sports car, swapping its front-engine layout for a mid-engine layout to boost performance and handling.

Models like the ZR1 are low-volume vehicles designed to draw attention to the brand and tempt drivers toward less expensive Corvette models.

“The ZR1 is the high-end model. It's the flagship vehicle. It will bring a lot of attention to the car and actually help sell the other models,” Juechter said. “It's part of the current business strategy to keep the product relevant over a relatively long life cycle.”

Other high-performance models have helped push the average Corvette transaction price up to about $106,000.

Franz said pricing is expected to continue to rise with the introduction of the ZR1 and sales growth of the track-focused Z06, whose average buyer has a household income of $311,000.

Additional sales of the hybrid Corvette, which starts at about $105,000, should also help boost Corvette revenue. GM plans to increase production of the E-Ray to 10 percent of total production capacity from current levels of 2 percent to 3 percent, Franz said.

The ripple effect on performance has also helped keep the sole Corvette-producing plant in Bowling Green, Kentucky, running on two shifts since 2019.