50 Fun Facts About Chevrolet

Before cars, Chevrolet co-founder William C. Durant ran America's largest maker of what?

Carriages: his Durant-Dort Carriage Company was the biggest in the US, and he used its money and factories to rescue the struggling Buick firm.

In which country was Louis Chevrolet born?

Switzerland: born in La Chaux-de-Fonds, he later lost his aircraft-engine business in the Depression and went back to Chevrolet as a factory mechanic.

What was Louis Chevrolet's profession before lending his name to the company?

Racing driver: Durant hired him to race Buicks, but after repeated disagreements between the two men, Louis sold Durant his stake in the company.

What did William C. Durant use Chevrolet to do in the 1910s?

To regain control of General Motors: swapping Chevrolet shares for GM stock won back the company he had founded, but he was forced out again in 1920.

In 1913, Durant moved Chevrolet's production from Detroit to which Michigan city?

Flint: Chevrolet's riverside works there grew to employ 14,000 men and became a battleground of the famous Flint sit-down strike.

What was the first Chevrolet automobile called?

Series C Classic Six: it cost far more than Ford's Model T, so under Durant it gave way to much cheaper four-cylinder Chevrolets.

In the most-repeated legend, where did Durant get the bowtie logo idea?

From wallpaper in a French hotel room: that's the story Durant himself told, but his daughter Margery wrote that he sketched the design at the dinner table one night.

Which color bowtie did Chevrolet phase in on all its cars and trucks from 2004?

Gold: the single color didn't hold, because buyers took to blacked-out trim and from 2016 Chevrolet began selling a black bowtie as a style option.

Which GM chief's maxim 'a car for every purse and purpose' made Chevrolet the corporation's volume brand?

Alfred P. Sloan: unlike Ford with its single model, he gave each GM brand its own price level so they didn't compete, with Chevrolet on the bottom rung.

Chevrolet first outsold Ford in 1927, the year Ford did what?

Closed to retool: Ford idled its lines for months to swap the Model T for the Model A, and the Chevrolet boss who pounced, William Knudsen, was a production wizard who had quit Ford.

What nickname did Chevrolet's famous 1929 overhead-valve inline six acquire?

Stovebolt: when Toyota built its first production car, the 1936 AA, it reverse-engineered the engine from a Chevrolet powered by this six.

Which Chevrolet engine did Ed Cole's team design in 15 weeks for 1955?

Small-block: it remade staid Chevrolet as a performance brand, and it soon became the first choice of hot rodders and grassroots racers.

The Corvette was named after what?

A small, maneuverable warship: PR man Myron Scott suggested it, and the badge's US flag was dropped because the flag can't go on a commercial product.

What color were all 300 hand-built 1953 Corvettes?

Polo White: every early Corvette came with a six-cylinder engine and an automatic gearbox, and Chevrolet built just 3,640 in 1954 against the 10,000 it had planned.

In which Kentucky city has the Corvette been built since 1981?

Bowling Green: the plant was once a Chrysler air-conditioner factory, and in 2014 a sinkhole under the nearby National Corvette Museum badly damaged eight Corvettes.

Which Corvette generation was the first to move the engine behind the driver?

C8: putting the V8 behind the driver after seven front-engined generations also gave the car a second luggage compartment up front.

Which engineer is nicknamed the 'Father of the Corvette', though Harley Earl created the car?

Zora Arkus-Duntov: he found the 1953 show car beautiful but underpowered, and his proposals got him hired to help turn it into a real sports car.

Which Pontiac model shared its platform and major parts with the Camaro?

Firebird: the twins ran different engines at first and were dropped together in 2002, but only the Camaro returned, since GM closed Pontiac itself in 2010.

What was the Camaro's best-known codename during development?

Panther: Chevrolet killed it off with a stunt, inviting reporters to the first and last meeting of its 'Society for the Eradication of Panthers from the Automotive World'.

What did Chevrolet famously tell reporters a Camaro was?

A small, vicious animal that eats Mustangs: the quip took aim at Ford's runaway hit, the very car Chevrolet had built the Camaro to fight.

Which Autobot turns into a Camaro in the live-action Transformers films that began in 2007?

Bumblebee: in the original toys and animated series he turned into a small yellow Volkswagen Beetle, but the live-action films made him a Camaro instead.

In which country was the revived 2009 Camaro built?

Canada: GM built the revived car at Oshawa, Ontario, even though much of its engineering had been done by GM's Holden arm in Australia.

The Bel Air was named after a wealthy neighborhood in which city?

The name came from Bel Air, the wealthy Los Angeles enclave; from 1950 to 1952 it was used only on two-door hardtops, before the mid-1950s 'Tri-Five' Bel Airs became icons.

Which Chevrolet's 1964 model became the classic lowrider?

Impala: its X-shaped frame let the body sit unusually low, which made it a natural fit for the hydraulic suspensions that lowrider builders were adopting.

In the 1960s, which group famously leased new Corvettes for $1 a year?

NASA astronauts: Indy 500 winner Jim Rathmann, who ran a Chevrolet dealership near Cape Canaveral, set up the deal, though John Glenn used it for a family station wagon.

Which Chevrolet holds the record as the longest-produced automobile nameplate in the world?

Suburban: the name began as a generic label for wagons that Dodge, Plymouth and others also used, and GM won it as an exclusive trademark only in 1988.

What was unusual about the Corvair's engine layout when it launched for 1960?

Rear-mounted and air-cooled: the layout followed the hit VW Beetle, but it later kept the sporty Corvair Monza from matching the sales of its Ford rival.

Which 1965 book by Ralph Nader attacked the early Corvair's handling?

Unsafe at Any Speed: GM responded by hiring private detectives to investigate its author, which the company's chief executive later admitted under oath to a Senate inquiry.

The 1959 El Camino was Chevrolet's answer to the success of which Ford model?

Ford Ranchero: the copy outlived the original, because Ford dropped its car-based pickup after 1979 while Chevrolet kept building the El Camino until 1987.

Which top-of-the-line Chevelle model fully replaced the Chevelle name in 1978?

Malibu: the Chevelle had launched for 1964 to take on Ford's midsize Fairlane, but its luxury trim ended up outliving the Chevelle name itself.

Under what name was the Nova originally sold when it launched in 1962?

Chevy II: aimed squarely at Ford's Falcon, it used Nova only for its top series until that name replaced Chevy II on every version for 1969.

The Silverado, launched for 1999, took its name from what?

The top trim of the older C/K trucks: Mexico now runs the ladder the other way, selling Silverado as the basic work truck and badging the plusher versions Cheyenne.

The Chevrolet Volt was sold in Europe under which name?

As the Opel Ampera (Vauxhall Ampera in Britain), the Volt's European twin was named 2012 European Car of the Year; the Volt itself was 2011 North American Car of the Year.

Which Chevrolet compact was at the center of GM's 2014 ignition-switch recall?

Cobalt: GM engineers had known of the fault for about a decade before the recall, and the company forfeited $900 million to settle the US criminal case.

Which company's battery cells powered the first-generation Chevrolet Bolt EV?

LG: manufacturing defects in the battery cells it supplied caused fires, and GM ended up recalling every Bolt it had built to replace them.

Which singer's 1950s NBC variety show ended with the 'See the USA in Your Chevrolet' sign-off?

Dinah Shore: she wasn't the first to sing it, since the jingle had aired on Chevrolet's short-lived earlier show Inside U.S.A., but it found real fame on hers.

Chevrolet's famous 1970s jingle grouped the brand with baseball, hot dogs and what?

Apple pie: the formula traveled, so South Africa sang of braaivleis, rugby, sunny skies and Chevrolet, and Holden in Australia of football, meat pies and kangaroos.

Which Chevrolet subcompact, built at Lordstown, Ohio, was Motor Trend's 1971 Car of the Year?

Vega: GM and the Southern Pacific railroad designed it to travel standing nose-down in special railcars, so each car could carry 30 Vegas.

Which refrigerator maker became part of General Motors in the late 1910s?

Frigidaire: World War II halted its civilian production, so the automatic clothes washer it had been preparing only reached buyers after the war.

Which company did Louis Chevrolet co-found after leaving Chevrolet?

Frontenac Motor Corporation: its plan to build passenger cars never got beyond prototypes, and the company filed for bankruptcy in 1923.

In 2005 GM relaunched Chevrolet in Europe selling cars built by which company?

The tagline was 'Daewoo has grown up enough to become Chevrolet.' GM reversed course in 2013 and withdrew the brand from Europe except for the Camaro and Corvette.

Which Bob Seger song played in Chevrolet's long-running truck commercials of the 1990s?

Like a Rock: Seger refused the ad offer for a long time, and he changed his mind only after an autoworker urged him to do something for the car companies.

What did Chevrolet introduce in 1957 as an option on the Corvette and Bel Air?

Its first fuel-injected engine: the costly option lasted only until 1965, when a bigger carbureted V8 gave Corvette buyers more power for far less money.

Which 1980s Chevrolet was a rebadged Suzuki imported from Japan?

Sprint: the little car had begun as GM's own project, which GM judged unprofitable and sold unfinished to Suzuki in exchange for a stake in the company.

From the 2014–15 season, Chevrolet became principal shirt sponsor of which English football club?

Manchester United: the bowtie stayed on the club's shirts until 2021, years after GM had pulled Chevrolet's mainstream cars out of Europe.

Which cheap Chevrolet model's strong sales let Durant repurchase control of General Motors by 1916?

Louis Chevrolet had already sold Durant his share in 1914 after disagreements over design.

Which driver won five straight NASCAR Cup championships in Hendrick Motorsports Chevrolets from 2006 to 2010?

Jimmie Johnson: Jeff Gordon spotted him in NASCAR's second-tier series and brought him to Rick Hendrick, who added a fourth car with Gordon listed as its co-owner.

In the 1990s, Chevrolet's partnership with Toyota produced which Geo-branded compact?

Prizm: it was built at NUMMI, the GM–Toyota plant in Fremont, California, which Tesla bought after the venture closed and turned into its own car factory.

Which 1955 Chevrolet two-door station wagon grew out of a Corvette-based Motorama show car?

Nomad: sales slipped every year and never met GM's hopes, and with a new body due for 1958 the two-door ended after 1957, its name passing to four-door wagons.

In 2009, which country became Chevrolet's third-largest market, behind the US and Brazil?

China: the rise didn't stop there, because in 2010 GM as a whole sold more vehicles in China than it did at home in the United States.