Chevrolet has produced close to two million Corvettes over the past 72 years, but if you look at certain points in the car’s history, you’ll see that some are much rarer than others. For instance, Chevy only built five 1963 Grand Sports, and there were supposedly only two ’69 ZL1s. As the following video from the National Corvette Museum shows, there was no official 1983 Corvette, but one of the pre-production cars still exists thanks to an odd combination of circumstances.
According to Dave McLellan, the Corvette’s chief engineer from 1975 until 1992, the third-generation Corvette ran too long, and GM had trouble adapting to the changing safety, emissions, and fuel economy regulations of the time. Clearly, “America’s Sports Car” needed to be brought up to date, which led to the initial concept of the C4 Corvette in the late 1970s/early 1980s.
Despite the use of computers and mathematical analysis in the C4‘s development, rigorous testing at the Milford Proving Grounds, and tireless work to fix various problems, the team behind the new Corvette ultimately decided to skip the 1983 model year. It simply needed more time to get the next generation of an automotive icon right.
That left the Corvette team with a bunch of pre-production cars that couldn’t be sold and needed to be destroyed. Instead of having them trucked away to be disposed of off-site, Chevy called in a mobile crusher, which processed all of them except one. Luckily for Corvette fans, it was raining the day that the car was supposed to be turned into a giant paperweight. Ralph Montileone, Quality Manager at Bowling Green Assembly Plant back then, happened to be wearing a brand-new pair of cowboy boots and didn’t want to ruin them, so he decided to delay the car’s demise until the next day. By then, the crusher was gone.
After that, the last remaining 1983 Corvette development car was largely overlooked and neglected by the Bowling Green facility’s staff. Plant manager Paul Schnoes noticed it, though. At one point, the L83-powered white car had been given a blue nose and lower-body paint along with red stripes, but Schnoes had it returned to its original plain white finish. After the National Corvette Museum opened in 1994, the 1-of-1 1983 Corvette was transferred there, where it remains as a fascinating piece of Corvette history.