As Many as 10 Million People Have Had Their Lives Intersect With A Corvette

Click above image to hear Harley telling how he came up with the Corvette idea

One of the great untold Twentieth Century stories is the genesis of the Corvette and Harley Earl’s role as the visionary designer / inventor who chose to incorporate Chevrolet’s greatly enlarged manufacturing program, together with GM’s unparalleled resources, to turn a powerful new American sports car into reality. Fifty years have now past, and the best part of this story is finally coming to the surface.

There is only one loyal patriotic father responsible for the parade of Corvettes marching down a brand new Los Angeles motor freeway in 1955 (photo above). The fact these cars were "red, white and blue" was not some haphazard coincidence. It was just one more elaborate messaging devise Harley Earl used to communicate another one of his product designs through the language of vision. This unique car architect was responsible for creating a symphony of artistic motoramic masterpieces (dating back to the late 1920s) which literally lured millions of loyal car buyers to seek out GM's product design. So, it's really no surprise that Corvette rolled out of this man's hybrid engineering studio doors and became the first all-American sports car to go in to production.  

The legend of Corvette clearly developed from the work Harley Earl did during World War Two, and thus why he code named this sports car after the German brand “OPEL” in its early concept phase or genesis years (see all the convincing examples below). It’s important to note how the Opel name often receives a sentence or two in numerous books written on Corvette, but no author, journalist or auto historian has ever done a  comprehensive job on where and why the name was used in the first place. Again, this all has to do with Harley Earl’s secretive nature and how he never put his mouth all over his creations. But thankfully, he left an incredible paper trail that is now finally coming forward, and once perused, straightforwardly debunks many of the detractor's claims on how and why the Corvette was created in the beginning.

To meet a triumphant country yearning for more of his distinctive new products, Harley Earl came up with another unique message all his own after the war years, thus, the Corvette was born. This bedrock American icon did not come to reality by any work done by some white-haired Russian expatriate...like some strange group, starting many years after Harley Earl's death, would concoct and then spin into the equation leading the public into believing. Nor did any corporate GM committee ever have a say in the matter concerning its origin. That's because, while Mr. Earl was alive the Corvette was always his baby. Like many understated artists, he just never liked shouting it out. So of course, his low key nature went on to permit all sorts of false claims to come to pass after he was gone (click image below). 

What's exciting today is that the most seminal moment – “the beginning” – behind the creation of America’s only time honored sports car has not yet been revealed. No doubt, this man’s original story coming forward is going to launch this automobile's cult car status to an all-new level in the years following the fiftieth anniversary that took place in June, 2003.

It’s virtually unheard of for any car to remain in continuous production for a half-century. During this span, more than one million two hundred thousand Corvettes have been built, with an estimated 900,000 still in existence. As many as 10 million people have had their lives intersect with a Corvette – they have either owned one or been married or closely related to a Vette owner. Add in the millions more who have simply coveted a Corvette, and the Vette fan base becomes larger than the population of some countries.

Read, Harley Earl's own words on "the Corvette's beginning," below, to find out more on this man's relentless pursuit at delivering his products to a loyal client base of millions of Americans who had developed an insatiable taste and yearning to buy all he could make!

Tape recorded interview by a local Detroit writer, Stan Brams, in January 1953. In this meeting, Harley Earl says exactly where he got the original Corvette idea – his “little thing that I started” has played no small part helping GM ascend to a position of industrial leadership today. For the Corvette is not only a sexy lure that attracts millions of Chevrolet buyers into their showrooms, but it does the exact same thing for all of the other products General Motors makes and sells from their extended network of automobile dealerships across the land.

H. Earl: All right; anytime. I want to be helpful. I don’t want to bore you.

S. Brams: No, this is fantastic.

H. Earl: The one thing I don’t want to do is to make this history, let’s call it, like I was tooting…there was no one here but Harley Earl. You get my point? I don’t want the fellow’s 20 or 30 years from now to read through and say, ‘Jeez, that was an egotistical son of a bitch.’ You get that? That’s very harmful.

S. Brams: You’re going to get a lot of credit, and you’re entitled to that.

H. Earl: You understand, I just don’t want ever to take any of what the boys helped me with. I really had the fun of doing it, don’t you know, and that’s quite a bit. And I do look…a thing that I introduced Styling in Detroit. I get a lot of fun out of it. These boys have helped me, as you can see, are really very loyal and hard-hitting kids.

S. Brams: Great gang around here.

H. Earl: So I’d like to tell you everything. But I’d like to delete anything and fix it so it doesn’t look like you came in and I told you what to say, see, and I said I-I-I-Me-Me. I only kind of did that because it’s hard to get the continuity without kinda giving you the romance of it. I was trying to give you a little of that.

S. Brams: Don’t worry. I won’t embarrass you.

H. Earl: Yeah. Because, you know, with me, it’s just like when I finished the LE SABRE…I’m going to show you a car right now…let’s see, the Corvette was a little thing that I started. I ran that LE SABRE  up pacing a race, and then I got the idea…sports car race at Watkins Glen, that’s where I got the idea for the Corvette… 

Harley Earl's post war two-seater sported the first hide-away top (still in use today on most modern convertibles) ever conceived on a production model car. A radical new concept, it came directly from the first electric convertible top used on Le Sabre, the predecessor to the Corvette.

Here’s another way of looking at the magnitude behind what the industrial artist/engineer created,

“General Motors has made more than 1,350,000 Corvettes in the last 54 years that Chevrolet has sold to motorists and collectors. Where did the line of success originate: Harley Earl only made one.” 

The DaVinci of Detroit created a string of success - the Corvette is merely a candle on the cake of his career - that has expanded into the 21st Century.

Here is what Irv Rybicki said regarding meeting Mr. Earl after being hired into the GM Styling Section back during World War Two, "I thought Harley Earl was ' Mr. General Motors.' Some of the unique cars he designed, like the Buick Y-Job, simply inspired me like nothing else in life...it's why I originally applied to work for GM."  

Click here to read another key quote by Mr. Rybicki.

ORIGINAL PRESS RELEASE INFO: "This is Chevrolet Corvette, a new type of American sports car originally shown at the General Motors Motorama of 1953. Only 33 inches high, it has a glass fiber reinforced plastic body. It's engine is basically a 1953 Chevrolet aluminum piston valve-in-head "Blue Flame" with increased compression ratio, triple side draft carburetors and in body dual exhaust system."  

Webster's Dictionary description for " B U L L ' S - E Y E " a: the center of a target; b: something that precisely attains a desired end.

Click any of the images below to discover why it took over 50-years for this elaborate story to come to the surface.

Germany was determined to be supreme in motor racing before WW-Two. So, when Hitler thundered, “Here’s the money – do it!” you did it – or you quietly disappeared from view. For that reason the state subsidized W125 Grand Prix automobile was built without regard to expense. 

With all this new information coming out...it's now easier for people to fathom how Harley Earl's original Le Sabre, the prototype of the Corvette, was kind of our subtle All-American send back message to Germany after the ravages of war.