People · Harley Earl · Chapter 4 of 6

A Sports Car for the Rest of Us

Detroit — early 1950s

The idea starts, as Earl's ideas usually do, with something he's seen on the street. American servicemen stationed in England and the Continent have spent the postwar years discovering a category of automobile Detroit doesn't build at all: small, light, exuberantly impractical two-seaters — MGs, Jaguars, Alfa Romeos — cars that do nothing useful and do it with tremendous style. They ship them home by the thousand. By the early 1950s these little imports are a common enough sight on American roads that Earl, whose entire career has been built on noticing what people want before they can articulate it themselves, cannot stop noticing them.

His read on the situation is characteristically blunt: Detroit's full-sized, chrome-heavy sedans have nothing to say to this customer, and nothing in any GM division's product plan says anything different is coming. If Chevrolet — the volume, entry-level GM brand — doesn't build an American answer to the European roadster, some clever import dealer or a hungrier competitor will keep collecting checks from young, style-conscious American buyers indefinitely. This is not, in Earl's telling, really about romance. It is about a hole in the product line that a styling chief happens to be uniquely positioned to see.

Detroit built cars for families. Earl noticed an entire generation that also wanted a car for showing off — and Detroit had nothing to sell them.

He takes the idea to Chevrolet's engineering side, where it becomes an internal project carrying the unglamorous designation EX-122, assigned to Chevrolet's experimental department. Earl's studio shapes the body: a low fiberglass roadster — fiberglass chosen partly because it sidesteps the enormous tooling cost of stamped steel for a low-volume experiment, letting GM test the market without betting the farm — with a mesh-toothed grille, wire wheel covers, and a stance unlike anything else Chevrolet has ever built. What goes underneath the pretty shape is, notably, not exotic at all: a stock “Blue Flame” inline six borrowed from Chevrolet's sedan lineup and a two-speed Powerglide automatic. Earl's department is selling image first. The mechanical substance is expected to follow later, if the image sells.

The car needs a name before it can appear in public, and here Earl's instincts as showman take over again: GM public-relations man Myron Scott — already well known internally as the founder of the All-American Soap Box Derby — is tasked with finding one. Scott works through roughly three hundred candidates that go nowhere, then lands on a word from the dictionary's C section: corvette, a small, fast naval escort ship built for speed over size. The room likes it immediately. There is no focus group, no committee vote drawn out over weeks — just Earl's team recognizing, the way they'd recognize a good line on a clay model, that the word simply fits.

By January 1953, EX-122 is finished, badged Corvette, and loaded onto a truck bound for the Waldorf-Astoria. Earl has built the bet. Now he has to find out if anyone else is willing to place it.