For months now, the Internet has been abuzz over the rear end of the seventh-generation Corvette.
Some old-timers have made no secret that they don’t care much for the move away from the traditional round tail lamps that have been on the Corvette since 1963 (though some C4s had rectangular lights and the C5 had ovals).
Tom Peters, design director for the 2014 Corvette Stingray, recently took a few moments to talk with Autoweek to explain his team’s thinking as they designed the rear of the car.
Peters admits he’s heard the critics say that the back of the C7 looks too much like a Camaro.
To which he responds: “I would invite them to pull a Camaro up right next to this and have a look” and remember that this isn’t the first time the two cars have shared similar rear treatments over the years.
Peters discloses that the designers did in fact try round tail lamps while working on the C7 design, “but quite frankly it made the car look old and it just didn’t work with this form vocabulary,” he says.
His goal, he says, was to push the Corvette away from those traditional round signatures to create as much newness as possible.
“I really wanted to shake it up,” Peters says. “I figure, I believe that’s my job, is to move the needle and sometimes that may be uncomfortable. But if you do it in a calculated, careful way to where if you push the boundaries, it may be uncomfortable to some but at the end of the day, two things have to prevail.”
The first is when you stand back and look, it still has to look like a Corvette, “and number two, it has to have a sense of beauty on its own,” he says. “And I believe the tail lamps of the new Corvette Stingray deliver that in many different facets.”
Peters wanted to use dual tail lamps that took advantage of the latest LED technology and aerodynamic functionality and believes “when you look at the Corvette Stingray, you’ll see that unique signature of Corvette but done in a fresh way.”
When all is said and done, Peters believes two basic things: first, that the back of the Stingray says new Corvette and, second, that the new design will “stand the test of time.”
