C7 Corvette Fuel Pump Dies During ‘Automobile Magazine’ Test Drive

By Detroit Steel - April 21, 2015

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What’s worse for Chevrolet than having a fuel pump go out on a C7? Well, having a fuel pump go bad twice on a C7 being driven as a test car for a national auto magazine like Automobile.

That’s not to say that Chevy isn’t likely troubled by both scenarios, because each one warrants a level of concern. It’s just that the idea of a fuel pump going bad for a car publication (twice in two months, no less) tends to get far more news coverage, as highlighted in the Automobile story detailing the issue.

Automobile‘s first fuel pump problem occurred in the driveway of writer David Zenlea. The second happened in Louisville during a road trip from Detroit while sharing the road with a Jaguar F-TYPE being driven by one of Zenlea’s colleagues.

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“I typically leave the magnetorheological dampers in Touring to absorb the bumps from the expansion joints of the highway, yet separately set the two-mode exhaust to Sport so I can always hear the 6.2-liter V-8 rumbling,” Zenlea wrote in the story. “That’s how I knew instantly that something was wrong. I’d stepped on the throttle in second gear to chase the F-TYPE back onto the highway, and instead of bounding forward, the ‘Vette coughed, slowed, and finally stalled right in the middle of rush-hour traffic.”

Like I said, when it happens to press, it’s not the sort of issue that simply goes away when the problem is fixed. The good news, however, was that after being forced to take the car to Campbell Chevrolet in Bowling Green, Automobile learned that the mechanics who first worked on the fuel pump did not replace the power control module as they should have, which means it really didn’t actually go bad twice.

But still …