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C8 corvette manual
The model may not be as talked about as some of its rivals, but make no mistake, this is not only one of the most stylish rides made by Chevy, but it can beat many of the fastest options on the road. When it comes to these fast and powerful cars, manual transmissions have traditionally been viewed as the choice of real gearheads.
Being able to drive a stick shift has always been seen as a badge of courage, but now, thanks to newer technologies, fewer vehicles are being offered with a manual option via Get Jerry. Case in point? The C8 Corvette was revealed with an automatic transmission in and buyers didn't have the option of swapping that out for a manual alternative. The announcement was met with mixed reactions — while many people understood the reasoning, others said they'd take their money elsewhere.
The idea of a sports car lacking a manual transmission may sound like an odd concept, but sometimes companies have to make decisions to benefit the product's overall quality. When the then-new Corvette C8 was announced for , many traditionalists were bewildered at the omission of a manual transmission option.
As with any multifaceted decision like this, there are a number of factors. But the primary reason didn't have to do with engineering or packaging. Executive chief engineer Tadge Juechter told Car and Driver that part of the reason is the desire to not breach the mid-engine C8's central tunnel: "That tunnel is the backbone of the car, and if you break the backbone, you lose a lot of structural efficiency.
With a shifter, you have to have a big hole in the tunnel for the linkage to go through. Another factor is the dramatically increased performance of the new Corvette's automatic , which, for the first time in the car's history, is a dual-clutch unit.
The launch-control functionality and far quicker shifts of this new eight-speed would easily outperform that of a manual-equipped car; Chevy claims that the C8 will be capable of hitting 60 mph in under three seconds when equipped with the Z51 performance package, a dramatic improvement of about a full second.
It certainly requires a non-trivial investment to engineer, tune, and certify an additional powertrain variant, but Juechter's deputy, chief engineer Ed Piatek, told us that those are challenges the Corvette's ace engineering team would've happily overcome.
Piatek said that the real thing that put the team over the edge in their decision was a lack of customer demand. Citing manual-transmission take rakes for the C7 Corvette, which started at or slightly above 50 percent when it launched as a model, he says those have more recently dwindled down to only 20 percent. Perhaps these are the same cretins who have been begging for all-season tires, which are newly standard on the C8.
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