Do Corvette Bodies Still Use Fiberglass? It's Complicated
Chevrolet rolled the first Corvette ever made off its Flint, Michigan assembly line in June, 1953. Ultimately, Chevy produced 300 predominantly hand-crafted Corvettes for the 1953 model year.
Those first 300 Corvettes, the foundation of the C1 generation, all featured red interiors and Polo White-finished fiberglass bodies. Chevrolet engineers chose fiberglass to create the complex details and curves of the Corvette body, taking advantage of the substance's durability and low weight. These characteristics are still at the root of materials chosen to create the newest C8 Corvette. However, Chevrolet has long moved past the advantages fiberglass provided for many years.
The process for creating the Corvette's fiberglass body changed to a press-mold process with the introduction of the C3 in 1968, although the materials used remained similar. By 1973, Corvette body production evolved to the use of a sheet-molded compound, with the material still composed of fiberglass and resin. But modern Corvettes' bodies, dating back to the C5 generation, are sheet-molded using carbon fiber-reinforced plastic.
What are C8 Corvettes made of?
While the C8 Chevrolet Corvette Stingray may return childhood memories of older model 'Vettes for some people, there's nothing childlike about the materials used in its construction. The engineers who design it haven't strayed from the quest of building lightweight models with impressive power and technology. Carbon fiber is used frequently in aerospace and military applications. And in addition to the carbon fiber-reinforced plastic used in C8 Corvette bodies, new materials were incorporated into other parts of the car.
As far back as the C6 Corvette generation, models like the Z06 and ZR1 included aluminum chassis components. The C7 Corvette debuted in 2014 with an all-aluminum frame. The Aluminum Extruders Council reports that approximately 97% of the C8 Corvette's structure is made of aluminum — 18% cast aluminum, 39% stamped aluminum, and 40% extruded aluminum. The remainder is a mix of cast magnesium, carbon fiber and steel.