New Corvette Z06 Is The Bomb

Everyone around the world has flipped their calendars to 2015. Nobody wanted the year to be over faster than General Motors who basically had to recall every vehicle under their manufacturing umbrella built since 1972. The 2015 model-year was going to be a new start for the Detroit-based automaker. All of their cars were going to avoid killing customers in new and interesting ways and be outfitted with wifi, to boot. However, there is a story circulating the internet, which started on Corvette Forum about an exploding 2015 Chevy Corvette Z06. To GM and Chevy’s credit, this seems like a very isolated incident.

The story goes that a new owner was going the through the process of breaking in the engine of his brand new 2015 Corvette Z06 before he was to take place in some kind of track day event. The owner of the affected car, known only by his Corvette Forum handle as “lawdogg149”, is quoted on several other blogs following the heartbreak as saying,

“While making a pull from 35 mph, I accelerated and shifted short of redline, and boom — the car began knocking. I pulled over and popped the hood. I could hear a loud knock coming from the No. 6 cylinder area along with a serious, grinding, metal-on-metal sound coming from the supercharger area.”

Autoblog reporter Brandon Turkus quoted some hypotheses from other sources for the reason for the failure as: One, a catastrophic failure in the manufacturing process or, two, lawdogg149 stuck the 650-horsepower vehicle into the wrong gear. The good news is this GM is replacing the engine under warranty, as the motor had less than 900 miles on it. Also, it would stand to reason this blown-up engine is going to pulled apart and examined with every shining piece of CSI equipment available to General Motors. This is saving our would-be hero about $24,000. Either way, whoever is putting in that new engine will have to work quickly to make sure the driver has plenty of time to work out the (non-exploding) kinks before his track day run in a couple of weeks.

Overall, we have to say kudos to General Motors and Chevrolet for doing the right thing and replacing the engine. Between cars that shut themselves down for no reason and the rest of awful surprises the company has seen lately, more bad public relations don’t need to follow.