Chevrolet’s Corvette ZR1X is easily the coolest and most impressive American-made performance car in history, stealing the mantle from the Marysville, Ohio-built Acura NSX. Unfortunately ZR1X is not a very cool name. Everyone in the automotive enthusiast world has been expecting Chevrolet to call its 1,250 horsepower all-wheel drive hybrid super-Corvette a “Zora” for at least the last decade, but that’s not a very cool name either. As soon as Chevy posted the teaser for this monster machine last week with the stylized “X” logo, I figured it would be doing the right thing and delivering a Corvette X-Ray to the world. Now that the car has been launched and we know its real name, I wish I had been right.
Look within you, you know it to be true. The best name for this car is Corvette X-ray. It’s just a dramatically cooler name for the American hypercar than ZR1X. X-Ray follows the Stingray to E-Ray naming convention already established by the brand. X-rays are electromagnetic radiation with shorter wavelengths and higher frequency than the visible light spectrum, implying that this car has higher energy than others, and might provide a slight sense of danger. I also think X-Ray is a good name for this car because Corvette is already named after a small and fast military sea vessel, so keeping with the theme of quasi-militaria cool that Americans love, why not amend Corvette with a letter in the NATO phonetic alphabet? X has also typically been used in automotive nomenclature to delineate an all-wheel drive model. It honestly just makes too much sense.
Why not Zora?
I’m sure a lot of you are ready to jump through your computer screens, travel down the series of tubes containing the information superhighway, and pop out at my computer ready to punch me in the face for saying Zora is a bad name. Of course I’m familiar with Zora Arkus-Duntov, the Belgium-born Russo-American engineer is considered the “father of the Corvette” despite joining General Motors after the introduction of the model at the 1953 Motorama. Everything that Arkus-Duntov did to push the performance of the Corvette forward in the 1950s and 60s is evident here in the ZR1X, but I still don’t think Zora is a very good name for a car, and General Motors agrees with me.
Unless you’re an extreme car nerd, you probably haven’t ever heard of the guy, and the kind of buyer who is going to drop a quarter million dollars on a Corvette ZR1X more than likely doesn’t know anything about Corvette history, or care about it. The ZR1X buyer is looking for European hypercar performance exclusive to billionaires on a millionaire’s budget. This is the top 10% getting a taste of the on-track high-speed performance previously only available to the top 1%, they may not even care what the name is, they just want to be able to say it.