- Harlan Charles has been let go as the Corvette’s product marketing manager
- He was a member of the Corvette team for 24 years
- He played a key role in taking the Corvette down the mid-engine path and was responsible for bringing back the ZR1 name
Chevrolet’s veteran Corvette product marketing manager, Harlan Charles, is no longer with General Motors.
He revealed the news via an Instagram post made last week, where he described his departure as his “Corvette dream” being over and that his bubble had burst.
In the post, Charles said GM had notified him that his time at the company was up, and that he is now retired.
Charles didn’t mention in the post why he was dismissed, and GM refused to comment when asked about the dismissal.
Charles’s exit from the Corvette team comes less than a year after the Corvette’s veteran chief engineer, Tadge Juechter, stepped down. Juechter chose to retire after 47 years at GM, and his replacement has since been named as Tony Roma.
Like Juechter, Charles spent decades working for GM. In his post, he said he had been with GM for 37 years and on the Corvette team for 24 of those years.
During that time, he worked on four generations of the Corvette, and among his proudest moments, according to the post, were presenting to management why the Corvette team should study a mid-engine platform (at the time for the C7), delivering the C8 Corvette Stingray with a starting price of $59,995 for its first year on the market, as well as bringing back the Grand Sport and ZR1 names.
2025 Chevrolet Corvette ZR1
In an interview with Road & Track published on Feb. 7, Charles goes into much greater detail about his time at GM, including about how during the 1990s he bugged then-Corvette chief engineer Dave Hill about joining the Corvette team while he was working nearby as a product manager for the Oldsmobile Intrigue.
Charles also revealed that GM had planned to take the C7 Corvette down the mid-engine route before the global financial crisis and GM’s bankruptcy nixed the project. He said a design was already completed, which featured C6 styling cues.
In addition to Charles’s early retirement, GM also parted ways with Corvette exterior design manager Kirk Bennion, who had been with the Corvette team since 1986.