Corvette

The Corvette began as EX-122, a hand-built show car for the January 1953 GM Motorama at the Waldorf-Astoria — Harley Earl's answer to the MGs and Jaguars American servicemen had brought home. Chevrolet rushed it into production that June: three hundred cars built on a makeshift line in Flint, every one Polo White over Sportsman Red, powered by a triple-carburettor truck six through a two-speed Powerglide. The car looked like a sports car and drove like a boulevard cruiser, and by the end of 1954 nearly a third of production stood unsold.

What saved it was engineering. Ed Cole's 265 small-block arrived for 1955, Zora Arkus-Duntov — who had joined Chevrolet two days after seeing the Motorama car — kept pushing performance, and Rochester's Ramjet injection made the 1957 283 the small-block that advertised one horsepower per cubic inch. The 1963 Sting Ray then rebuilt the car entirely: a 98-inch chassis with Duntov's independent rear suspension, hidden headlamps, and Mitchell's one-year-only split rear window. Big-blocks followed in 1965, and by 1967 the L88 was a thinly disguised racing engine Chevrolet deliberately underrated at 430 hp.

The 1968 C3 wrapped Shinoda's Mako Shark II language around the Sting Ray chassis and simply refused to die: chrome bumpers until 1972, the last convertible in 1975, a production peak of 53'807 cars in 1979, and a move to Bowling Green in 1981. When the line stopped in October 1982 there was no 1983 model at all — the C4 arrived as a 1984 — and the first thirty years had built about 730'000 cars and an institution.