The inside story behind the millionth Chevrolet Corvette - Detroit Free Press
How did the one-millionth Chevrolet Corvette get to be No. 1,000,000. No, not just by coming after No. 999,999, smart-aleck. Months of planning went into figuring out which Corvette would make history, and exactly when it would be built, former Corvette model-year manager Jeff Yachnin told me last week. Yachnin spent 17 years on the Corvette team. The car was damaged — virtually totaled, to the untrained eye — when a 30-foot sinkhole swallowed it and seven other cars at the National Corvette Museum in Bowling Green, Ky. , on Feb. Mark Phelan: Restoring historic Corvette 1. The first step was figuring out many Corvettes had already been built, Yachnin said. The 'Vette is one of the few GM models on which prototypes — early cars built while developing the new model — were built on the regular assembly line. In addition, the plant in Bowling Green builds preproduction cars — more refined than prototypes, but still not cars that can be sold to customers. The 'Vette team had to figure out exactly how many of all those vehicles had been built since 'Vette No. 1 in 1953. When they knew how many Corvettes had already been built, the team could see the millionth would come up around the end of the 1992... The 1993 model would be the Corvette's 40 anniversary, a number that could be used to generate publicity and marketing buzz. Source: www.freep.com
