If you want young people to buy a corvette, price it @ 30K max, otherwise they will not buy it period. Young people also do not buy Porsche's, Ferrari's, & GT-R's etc. By the time they start earning enough money to buy a nice car, they will also figure out why the LS motor is a great motor.

Right now in Calif. I am noticing the trend away from imports to Camaros & that is not the normal pattern here. The bottom line is the LS motor is one of the best performance motors around period.

 

I agree. And no, Transformers will not help the vette, because the one in that movie was ugly, in my opinion. The corvette is the ONLY major american sports car that has NOT suffered from the "let's take a design from the 60's, modernize it a bit, and call it a day" mentality. If Chevy brings out the stingray design, I'll be unhappy, because the stingray design has been down before.

Another aspect of making kids fall in love with the car has to do with visibility. And in a way, that falls to the owners of these cars. A car's reputation is forged on race tracks, be it drag, autox, or road racing. If current vette owners want to recruit the younger crowd, they gotta have their cars at events that the younger crowd attend. And then they gotta prove themselves. Where do you think the reputation the FC and FD RX7s came from? Or the Supra? Or the lowly civic? It didn't start with Fast and Furious...that movie was just a reflection of what was already happening. Brand new, the RX7 and the Toyota Supra were NOT cheap cars. The Supra, I think, was in the same price range as the C4 vette, it's competition. Same with the RX7. Food for thought.

 

As a younger guy (25), I can definitely say that I did not like the style of the Transformers concept 'Vette. Just something about it seems "off". Maybe I'm not representative of my age group, since I'm already a Corvette owner, and therefore like the styling of the existing Corvettes, though. I would say you can still appeal to existing 'Vette fans by keeping some styling queues such as the 4 round tail lights, while changing up some of the rest of the body.

I don't think there is anything "wrong" with the exterior styling, but these days it is common for a lot of vehicles to get new model years pretty often, so while I don't personally think 2005 to 2012 is that long for a Corvette generation, the car is common enough that people might be getting a bit bored with it. Another thing is advertising. Aside from the one early C6 commercial of the kid dreaming of driving a C6 (which was banned from TV), or the occasional cameo in a Cobalt or GM commercial, the 'Vette really doesn't get much advertising. I think a lot of people, especially my age, just plain don't really know about what the car can do. They are vaguely aware that the 'Vette exists, but completely blown away when they find out its actual performance capabilities.

As an engineer I love the Gen IV OHV V8s GM produces, they are great with power to weight and packaging, and I love the mountains of torque that lets me be in basically any gear, even in the hills/mountains of Vermont. I'm excited to see what the Gen V V8s bring, and think they are definitely the proper choice for the C7.

 

Sorry but DOHC on a mainstream Corvette model would be new technology. New for a Corvette. LT5 doesn't count.

 

It would be a step backwards at this point in time.

 

I depends on what you are trying to build. I was reading an article on a firm that is figuring out you can make a gasoline engine more efficient with a flat cylinder design than you can with a "V" configuration. This is a MAJOR step back but that doesn't necessarily mean anything. New innovations we make may open up opportunities on other things we have tried.

Often success comes from learning from failures, or at the very least learning from things that didn't turn out as expected