Yes, The Hybrid And AWD 2024 Chevrolet Corvette E-Ray Can Drift | Reveal

Hey, welcome to Car and Driver. Over here is the Chevrolet Corvette E-Ray. It's hybrid and it's all-wheel drive. Let's show you how it works. What is the E-Ray? Well, think of it in a couple different things. You've got the width of a Z06, you've got an electric motor on the front axle, you've got a 1.9 kilowatt hour battery in the tunnel underneath where your armrest is in the normal C8, and then you have a 6.2 liter V8 behind the cab in the mid-engine setup just like the standard C8 is. So 160 horsepower from the front electric motor, 495 horsepower from the V8. Do the math. 650, 655 horsepower. Plenty to get work done. Now, that battery is not very big and Chevy here says that it will stay charged under a as long as you're lapping on a smallish road course. As you get to higher speed road courses like VIR or Nuremberg Ring, you may have some issues with battery depletion, but we'll of course find it out whenever we test this thing at Lightning Lap at VIR. A couple interesting details that you will definitely want to see. The E-Ray comes standard with carbon ceramic brake rotors and base tires in all season. That might be the first pairing of that kind of equipment. A neat little detail there. Otherwise, it looks like the Corvette that we all know and are familiar with only has the additional width of that Z06 body, so there's not a lot to tell you that this is a hybrid outside of the E-Ray logo down there. Here we have this really helpful cutaway of the Corvette E-Ray that shows you what everything is happening, going on here, and the big detail is that the battery is right in there in this tunnel. If you remember when this car debuted, the shape was kind of interesting because it was just kind of this void in the center of the cabin and some people were like, well, that's probably where a battery is going to go, and hey, guess what? Right. This is where that battery resides, and let's go on the front here. You can see the electric motor right there and where it feeds the front wheels. Now, that requires putting half shafts in the suspension right here requires a couple changes, a lot of significant changes actually, because there's a half shaft going through where suspension parts normally are, and that actually ended up lifting a lot of the suspension up, including these shock towers, which is why you end up with this brace that runs across the front of the car, and that isn't even on the Z06 because in the standard Corvette, this shock ends at about here, and on this car, they've raised it up to account for that half shaft being there. Now, Chevy says you get the same suspension travel and that they started this vehicle with this design from the beginning, so there's nothing removed to make space for that, and it actually becomes more clear when you consider the front space because they still maintain this space here that you can use to load up with cargo. So, if you're familiar with the trunk, this is what it looks like. The only thing is this little step right here. That's what you lose. That's what you lose. Okay, wow, and what's this guy? That's for a show car to be able to turn the power on and off because it sits here with lights on all day. How you doing? Morning. Morning. So, now I'm here with Stefan. How are you doing? Great. We're going to go for a ride in the Corvette Yeray, and I'm interested in a few things. Can this drift? It can drift. It can drift. Can it do a burnout? It can do a burnout. Can it do a brake stand? It's a little tougher. A little tougher? Take some finesse. We'll see what we can manage. All right, let's get started. All right, so this is our new stealth mode, all-electric driving, kind of your quiet neighborhood exit. If you like your neighbors. So, we've got a simplified gauge cluster here, kind of compared to the standard Corvette you're used to, but shows your battery SoC speed, and then this little blue needle is going to give you an indication of when you're getting close to triggering that flying start, and that can happen based on a pedal input or when you get up to 45 miles an hour. Flying start is the name of when the engine kicks on? Correct. So, you'll see engine will start up automatically. Transmission will engage as a clutch, and will transition to conventional ice and electrified. Gotcha. And you've got power displays here. That's neat. Yep, that's showing your front axle and rear axle outputs. And it looks like I saw some motion graphics there as you change drive modes. Is that new for this year? Yeah, so that's specific to that flying start sequence and kind of giving you an update of the progression and letting you know when it's fully completed, that transition, and you're back to conventional driving. All right, now we're gonna do an acceleration run? We're gonna do a launch control launch. All right. Ready? Ready. So, did I hear some front wheel shatter there? A little bit, yep. We can try a little bit of a modified launch using the custom launch control. Okay, yeah, yeah. So, you can actually knock it down a little bit for the conditions being a little bit cool and wet today. And I understand that this does not have line lock. It does not have line lock, but it gets the same custom launch control feature as the 2306. Gotcha, okay. Ready? Yeah, ready. Yeah, that does all right. Yeah, so you can see actually doing a slightly softer launch, better matching for the conditions, you actually get a faster and quicker acceleration off the line. Do some drifting? Yeah. angle of the steering wheel and using the pedal, and the front's going to come in and again try to fill and support and help the car do what you're asking of it. Now, that electric motor does come with some big advantages, especially with regard to acceleration. Zero to 60 in Chevy claims two and a half seconds, quarter mile in ten and a half seconds. Now, this is not a plug-in hybrid because Chevy says this battery recharges so quickly, and it's designed to do that because it's kind of more of a performance adder instead of an efficiency adder. It also adds traction in poor weather as well. So, a lot of interesting things there. Unfortunately, it won't do a front-drive all-electric burnout, I asked, and you can't put the front motor in reverse and the engine in drive and do like one of those cool donuts, unfortunately. Now, beyond that, the price is going to start at over $100,000, I believe $105,000 roughly. Ultimately, we can't wait to test this thing to see what it does at our track.