Chevrolet Trivia
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50 free Chevrolet trivia questions with answers — technology quiz, new questions added Aug 2026.
Chevrolet was born in 1911 when a Swiss racing driver and an ousted General Motors founder went into business together, and within eight years the car had been used to take GM back. Since then the bowtie has been on the Stovebolt Six, the Bel Air, the small-block V8, the Corvette, the Camaro, the Impala, the Suburban and the Volt, and 'Chevy' has become shorthand for GM itself. This quiz covers the founders and the takeover, the disputed origin of the bowtie logo, the Corvette from Motorama to mid-engine, the Camaro's cat-and-Mustang launch, the Bel Air, Impala, Chevelle, Nova, El Camino and Suburban, the Corvair and Ralph Nader, the plug-in Volt and the Bolt, plus Dinah Shore, baseball, hot dogs and apple pie. There are easy questions any Chevy owner can get and harder ones about engineers, dates and production numbers for the people who own the shop manuals. Every answer is checked against a reference source and each question links to where the fact was confirmed.
30 of 50 questions with answers and explanations. Play the quiz
Q 01Before cars, Chevrolet co-founder William C. Durant ran America's largest maker of what?
Carriages
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.
Q 02In which country was Louis Chevrolet born?
Switzerland
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.
Q 03What was Louis Chevrolet's profession before lending his name to the company?
Racing driver
Racing driver: Durant hired him to race Buicks, but after repeated disagreements between the two men, Louis sold Durant his stake in the company.
Q 04What did William C. Durant use Chevrolet to do in the 1910s?
To regain control of General Motors
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.
Q 05In 1913, Durant moved Chevrolet's production from Detroit to which Michigan city?
Flint
Flint: Chevrolet's riverside works there grew to employ 14,000 men and became a battleground of the famous Flint sit-down strike.
Q 06What was the first Chevrolet automobile called?
Series C Classic Six
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.
Q 07In the most-repeated legend, where did Durant get the bowtie logo idea?
From wallpaper in a French hotel room
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.
Q 08Which color bowtie did Chevrolet phase in on all its cars and trucks from 2004?
Gold
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.
Q 09Which GM chief's maxim 'a car for every purse and purpose' made Chevrolet the corporation's volume brand?
Alfred P. Sloan
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.
Q 10Chevrolet first outsold Ford in 1927, the year Ford did what?
Closed to retool
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.
Q 11What nickname did Chevrolet's famous 1929 overhead-valve inline six acquire?
Stovebolt
Stovebolt: when Toyota built its first production car, the 1936 AA, it reverse-engineered the engine from a Chevrolet powered by this six.
Q 12Which Chevrolet engine did Ed Cole's team design in 15 weeks for 1955?
Small-block
Small-block: it remade staid Chevrolet as a performance brand, and it soon became the first choice of hot rodders and grassroots racers.
Q 13The Corvette was named after what?
A small, maneuverable warship
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.
Q 21Which Autobot turns into a Camaro in the live-action Transformers films that began in 2007?
Bumblebee
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.
Q 22In which country was the revived 2009 Camaro built?
Canada
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.
Q 23The Bel Air was named after a wealthy neighborhood in which city?
Los Angeles
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.
Q 14What color were all 300 hand-built 1953 Corvettes?
Polo White
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.
Q 15In which Kentucky city has the Corvette been built since 1981?
Bowling Green
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.
Q 16Which Corvette generation was the first to move the engine behind the driver?
C8
C8: putting the V8 behind the driver after seven front-engined generations also gave the car a second luggage compartment up front.
Q 17Which engineer is nicknamed the 'Father of the Corvette', though Harley Earl created the car?
Zora Arkus-Duntov
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.
Q 18Which Pontiac model shared its platform and major parts with the Camaro?
Firebird
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.
Q 19What was the Camaro's best-known codename during development?
Panther
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'.
Q 20What did Chevrolet famously tell reporters a Camaro was?
A small, vicious animal that eats Mustangs
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.
Q 24Which Chevrolet's 1964 model became the classic lowrider?
Impala
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.
Q 25In the 1960s, which group famously leased new Corvettes for $1 a year?
NASA astronauts
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.
Q 26Which Chevrolet holds the record as the longest-produced automobile nameplate in the world?
Suburban
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.
Q 27What was unusual about the Corvair's engine layout when it launched for 1960?
Rear-mounted and air-cooled
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.
Q 28Which 1965 book by Ralph Nader attacked the early Corvair's handling?
Unsafe at Any Speed
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.
Q 29The 1959 El Camino was Chevrolet's answer to the success of which Ford model?
Ford Ranchero
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.
Q 30Which top-of-the-line Chevelle model fully replaced the Chevelle name in 1978?
Malibu
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.