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

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. Nearly sixty years have passed, and the best part of the overall story is finally coming to the surface.

Harley Earl was responsible for creating a symphony of artistic motoramic masterpieces which went on to literally lure millions of loyal car buyers into GM showrooms. So, it's really no surprise that the Corvette rolled out of this man's hybrid engineering studio doors and quickly became the first all-American sports car to go in to production. 

Three other one-of-a-kind motoramic masterpieces designed by Earl (just like the very first 1953 Motorama Corvette) sold at the 2005 and 2006 Barrett-Jackson auctions for a combined total of over $10 million dollars. Back in 2000, most savvy car collectors didn't even know the real role Harley Earl played designing all GM concept cars. In fact, a little over a decade ago before the official Harley Earl website came along GM was spinning Earl's Design Legacy their way (leading up to the end of the twentieth century, the company's vernacular on GM design history was often incorrect and this naturally played a part in the company's undoing later on), you could have picked up the same trio of concept cars at auctions for well under $1 million dollars! This all had to do with a careless job done from the 1960s through the end of the 20th century "dumbing-down GM's design history." Let's just say, hopefully all those disloyal and un-passionate execs are all gone now that GM dodged a bullet and is still rolling forward again after the 2008/09 government bailout. In the future, GM's leaders need to be held more accountable. Corvette has always been Chevy's modern crown jewel and tainting Harley Earl's Corvette story is a no no.    

Young Harley in Hollywood with his most recent motoramic masterpiece, the 1927 La Salle. This car literally started a revolution in the auto business for it was the first professionally designed vehicle to come off an assembly line in America's auto capital. It changed the engineering playing field and this seminal automobile launched the modern "car design" profession. As these side-by-side photos can help anyone comprehend, auto-pioneer-Earl was perhaps the most influential chairman of change Detroit has witnessed in the modern era. 

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 fellows 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 production motor cars. A radical new concept, it came directly from the first electric convertible top ever used in auto world on Le Sabre, the predecessor to the Corvette.

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."

It’s virtually unheard of for any car to remain in continuous production for a half-century. During this span, more than 1,300,000 Corvettes have been built over the last fifty seven years and an estimated 900,000 still exist today. 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. Where did the line of success originate: Harley Earl only made one. 

A brand new Chevy vehicle from Arizona Chevrolet dealership is a great compliment to a classic Corvette or Camaro.