Curbside Classic: GM's Deadly Sin #9 – 1990 Corvette

Paul Niedermeyer
by Paul Niedermeyer

I walked well past this Corvette before I stopped and gave it a backwards glance, suddenly remembering that it is yellow convertible week. I wavered momentarily, gauging my feelings. Yes, it was fast and pulled impressive numbers on a skid pad. But numbers alone do not make the car. And my feelings meter just wasn’t moving one way or another, so I almost moved on. Call it the Madonna of sports cars? Then it hit me: this is the most soulless sports car ever, the ultimate antithesis to the TR-6. The C4 Corvette sold its soul to the devil of numbers. And in my cartechism, that’s a Deadly Sin.

Madonna would have been the right choice: hard, fast and soulless. The C4 was a technocart: seemingly designed to meet a few key stats, but all the other qualities that truly make a car were forgotten. I remember vividly Chevy crowing about how their new ’84 C4 was the first production car to pull over one G on the skid pad. Who cared, when the ride to the mythical glass-smooth skid pad was so punishingly hard that every pebble in the road became a menace to one’s health?

The eighties were GM’s worst decade ever, because the whole company had sold its soul to the numbers devil, Roger Smith. Everything at GM became reduced to numbers, resulting in…ever worse numbers. Of course, like most new GM cars that arrived during this period, the initial shortcomings were eventually attended to over the next few years, thanks to the screaming feedback from the paying beta testers.

But their endless complaints about the C4’s profound lack of structural cohesiveness were beyond just jiggering with the springs and shocks. The C4 was fundamentally flawed in that regard, and it made painfully clear how the plastic Chevy differed from a Porsche, much the same as it was thirty years earlier. Certain deeply ingrained personality traits are hard to shed.

The C4’s styling reflects its soulless character, or is it the other way around? Bill Mitchell, the soul father of the stunning 1963 C2 and the flamboyant 1968 C3 was highly dismissive of the C4, designed just after his retirement. I suspect the new Corvette wasn’t the only thing coming out of GM he felt that way about. Of course something a bit cooler than the emotive and exaggerated C3 was inevitable. It’s not so bad, from a distance. Get close, and it looks like a cheap kit car cobbled up by the kids down the street. Is it really a Fiero with a Corvette body kit?

That doesn’t even properly describe the interior: it looks like it came from some East Bloc country in the dying days of communism: it never fit together properly when new, and now it looks like its about to discombobulate. Maybe this one hasn’t exactly been pampered, but look at it! It’s coming apart at the seams, literally. This alone is one big nasty reason why old Corvettes are not very appealing. Makes the Triumph dash look look like a million bucks.

Well, at least the the new generation reconnected with the Corvette’s inner V8. After the miserable decline in the small block’s output for almost a decade, the C4 marked the turning point. There really was a redeeming feature to Roger’s love of technology! Fuel injection to the rescue, as well as whatever it took to get the venerable sbc to start breathing again. The resuscitation efforts started very modestly, with the highly mediocre cross-fire (two Iron Duke TBI units?) 5.7 extracting all of 205 hp. But when the General finally sprung for genuine port injection, like the 1957’s once had, long slumbering horses slowly began to stir again.

The incremental improvements came in clusters of five or ten ponies at a time, and by 1990, it was up to all of 240, almost back to 1974’s 245 hp LT-1. But that vaunted name returned for 1992, with a new LT1 that finally packed some serious punch: 300 hp. The Corvette was back! And the LT1 made the vastly more expensive ZR-1 look irrelevant, given that it cost twice as much for an extra 75 hp. Call me a wet blanket, but the ZR-1 was another numbers bragging fest whose numbers didn’t add up.

The C4 Corvette was a fairly modest seller. Once the pent up interest of the first two years were gone, it bumbled along at around 20k units, less than half the rate of what its aged and fairly lethargic C3 predecessor was selling through most of the seventies. That alone confirms it: soul sells; numbers don’t.

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Paul Niedermeyer
Paul Niedermeyer

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  • Vl5150 Vl5150 on Jul 08, 2013

    I don't agree completely with this article. The Corvette design team went through great pains to right the wrongs of the C3 Vette, which had became a soft, underpowered GT. I like C3's but by the late 70's it was no longer competitive with the rest of the world. The C4 was a hard core sports car and surprising that it came from GM given the C3's good sales figures. It held up with the best of it's time and restored credibility to Corvette's racing image. Let's see what you get for 5 grand today: Forged aluminum front A-arms, 5 link forged aluminum rear suspension, space age frame, clamshell hood, complete digital instrumentation (84-89). And compatibility with any cheap small block crate motor you can get from Chevrolet. What's the downside? Cheap interior, maybe ride? Anything else can really be fixed quite cheaply. As Han Solo said, "She got it where it counts". The sales figures reflected the hardcore nature of the C4. If you build a small, low sport car with deep bucket seats and a stiff ride you'll sell less cars. Whenever entry/exit improved, suspension softened, and the seats became flatter the sales went up. My recollection from the era: From it's introduction until about 1992 this was the car to have from what I remember. After that Chevy continued to improve the car but to me it really got long in the tooth. By '93 and needed to go. I think it's a good buy for what you get. There's guys spending $5-10K on 4 cyl forced induction to get the power levels that these cars come with stock.

  • Tdcurtner Tdcurtner on Oct 09, 2014

    balderdash!...meet me on the track with your soulfull whatever car. check out tcurtner on youtube and search for the green 90s soulless vette and watch it eat soulfull cars alive. Interior?? The lear seats were the best ever produced and put in a sports car (to date - except perhaps for those in the 4th gen viper - which i also have had). Don't listen to this diatribe, go check out C4s for yourself, and enjoy one of the best sports car bargains - if you are on a budget and are willing to modify it slightly - on the planet.

  • 1995 SC At least you can still get one. There isn't much for Ford folks to be happy about nowadays, but the existence of the Mustang and the fact that the lessons from back in the 90s when Ford tried to kill it and replace it with the then flavor of the day seem to have been learned (the only lessons they seem to remember) are a win not only for Ford folks but for car people in general. One day my Super Coupe will pop its headgaskets (I know it will...I read it on the Internet). I hope I will still be physically up to dropping the supercharged Terminator Cobra motor into it. in all seriousness, The Mustang is a.win for car guys.
  • Lorenzo Heh. The major powers, military or economic, set up these regulators for the smaller countries - the big guys do what they want, and always have. Are the Chinese that unaware?
  • Lorenzo The original 4-Runner, by its very name, promised something different in the future. What happened?
  • Lorenzo At my age, excitement is dangerous. one thing to note: the older models being displayed are more stylish than their current versions, and the old Subaru Forester looks more utilitarian than the current version. I thought the annual model change was dead.
  • Lorenzo Well, it was never an off-roader, much less a military vehicle, so let the people with too much money play make believe.
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