Yeah, the rear still looks terrible in person. Maybe in a darker color. Pictures when I get home.
And contrary to the insistence earlier, I'm not seeing anything terribly complicated in the rear end design that would have supposedly dramatically increased the cost to clean it up.
Edit:
As a preface, this is content sponsored by GM who paid for people to have $10 worth of food:
Front is more blunt in person than it looks in photos.
The display stuff:
Reminds me of some of the Porsche displays. Much more elaborate than I ever remember a Corvette one being in the past.
Cargo space was... not really that impressive. They say it will fit golf clubs, but I'm curious as to how. Considering this is a larger car than an NSX, there sure seems to be a lot less storage space and interior space. There was helpfully even an NSX there to compare to (though obviously I didn't sit in that):
(now
that's a car that looks much better in person than in photos).
I don't know if cubic feet wise the NSX is bigger and I'm sure GM went through one of their famous marketing bullet point checklists to make sure it's not, but it certainly seemed like a much better laid out storage compartment. Especially since the liftover is so much higher on the C8; which I'll get to in a second.
Seats are nicely bolstered and deep fitting, but they seem kind of flat and thin. These are the GT2 seats, as I understand. I suspect they still won't be a match for the middle-period C4 sport seats in long term comfort
and support.
The steering wheel is really not that comfortable. It seems like they only made it square because it was too large for the cockpit, but it still blocks sightlines to stuff in the interior anyway when the sides are so wide and the rim is so thick; and that's before you put your hands on it. Making it an inch or so smaller in diameter and/or a tad thinner would have been preferable to this Knight Rider thing. C7 wheel is definitely more comfortable to hold. The gauge cluster is fine. Nothing amazing, though maybe it does cool stuff when it's being driven.
Switchgear feels a lot nicer than the C7s, which already was nicer than the C6, which... well, was worse than the C5, but you get the point. Reminded me a lot more of the stuff in my ATS than any previous Corvette. Tighter tolerances, higher quality materials; but then these are well optioned show queens so who knows how the production ones will be.
That long bit of switches along the center console seem nicer laid out than they appear in pictures in terms of placement to the driver, but there are a couple functions that are grouped together in a dumping ground that make me think they won't be very easy to push without looking at them (like the heated vs cooled seats buttons in particular, which shouldn't even be grouped with HVAC like that) and some functions that are spread out that should be grouped together (why is the passenger side temperature control separate from all of the other HVAC controls?). They also sit so high and close to the passenger that the passenger-specific buttons are kind of hard to actually press from there. I suspect the extent of thought that the interior designer gave these is "they look really cool when all the lights are on at night."
The carbon fiber inserts all over the place are pretty tacky and seem like something from a car in this class ten years ago; or even a midsize sedan aping cars in this class from ten years ago.
Space wise, it's fine. Less space than anything since the C4, certainly looks like a fair bit less space than the smaller NSX, but not
cramped like a C3 or something..That center console is pretty ridiculous from the passenger seat though.
And for the elephant in the room:
It's still ugly. Absolutely. It's definitely not
as terrible in this color as it was in that blue from the other page, but it's not nice.
Maybe, hopefully it won't be so bad in a darker color, a green or blue or red, to hide it. I think the problem is that the taillights appear to stick out at least two inches further than the rest of the rear of the car. It's especially notable because there's a hard character line going up straight along the bottom corner that meets in the top corner of the rear similar to that on the C7 (but not as slab-sided); and then there's those awful Camaro taillights inset half an inch from the rest of the rear and jutting out to the sides disrupting the flow of the rest of the rear. The rest of the rear mostly looks fine (licence plate area is a bit fussy), but the taillights are so out of place that they almost look like they were straight sourced from something else.
Which is a shame because they are reasonably nice looking by themselves. Complex and modern without being hopelessly overdone (and actually much cleaner looking than the mess on the Camaro following its second emergency restyling); and even having a ripoff of Audi's sequential pattern that looks nice. The assemblies themselves are a much better looking design than the C7s, just integrated even worse than they were on that.
One more thing, that is inline with GM's usual tunnel vision when it comes to trying new things like this, is that that spoiler absolutely should be part of the hatch assembly instead of sitting on the very back of the car
in front of the place that you have to awkwardly lift the roof over to store it. I can only imagine removing it from that nearly vertical storage hole, no matter how light the roof is, will be even worse.