© Motor1.com UKChevrolet Corvette Right-Hand Drive
They are currently being tested... in America.
While Chevrolet has admitted it's taking a bet with the right-hand-drive Corvette C8, the company is determined to deliver a quality product for the markets in Australia, Japan, and UK. The development is already underway and the brand has just admitted it has already built a number of RHD prototypes.
CorvetteBlogger has learned from the Corvette Chief Engineer Tadge Juechter and Corvette Product Manager Harlan Charles that RHD cars already exist and they are currently being tested by members of the engineering team. Interestingly, the process takes place in the United States for now.
"Yes, some of us are actually driving them around. it's very strange to be driving a Corvette with the steering wheel on the right-hand side. We've built some and we'll be doing some of our pre-production testing now in the US," Tadge told the online publication.
The first market to get the RHD Corvette C8 is Japan, where it took the automaker just 60 hours to sell more than 300 examples. Australia will also get the supercar where it will reportedly be sold under the newly-founded General Motors Specialty Vehicles marque but not before the end of 2021 or even the early months of 2022. Perhaps everyone will be happy to hear the RHD models will be a direct mirror copy of the LHD cars.
RHD Corvette in the works:
"In our car, everything is driver-focused, everything is angled towards the driver, the cockpit wraps around you, and so when you do a right-hand drive, we didn't want to dumb that down, we wanted those customers to have the same exact experience whether it's Japan, UK, Australia," Tadge added. "We wanted them to have the same driver-focused interior and so what we actually did was tool-up all those unique parts that are kinda mirror shaped so that we can flip them over to the other side and it would just be an exact mirror of the rest of the world's car, the left hand drive cars."
Source: CorvetteBlogger