Published on March 29, 2026
I’m standing in a showroom at the new General Motors design headquarters outside of Detroit, resisting the urge to reach out and touch something. In front of me, there’s a Corvette CX, a one-of-one experimental sports car that the automaker has meticulously handcrafted to look both silky smooth and fast as hell. As I crouch down to see just how low this low-riding car would drive, the roof of the Corvette CX lifts up in front of me and opens like the cockpit of a multimillion-dollar fighter jet.
The robotic precision of the sculpted body opening up is pure spectacle atop the shock-and-awe of the car itself. GM designed this all-electric “hypercar” to be action-movie-ready. It’s capable of running on regular roads and high-speed racetracks, with 2,000 horsepower coming from individual motors for all four wheels. The skeleton chassis and interior structure are made of ultralight carbon fiber. Wind-turbine-like fans draw air through the open-channel bodywork. Just when a tight curve might jar the nerves of the whitest-knuckled drivers, an adjustable rear spoiler optimizes aerodynamics in real time.
The Corvette CX is an ostentatious tour-de-force of advanced engineering, design, and manufacturing that took a team of hundreds three years and undisclosed millions of GM’s nearly $70 billion market capitalization to create. So it’s a strange feeling, standing next to this singular vehicle, to be one of only a relatively small number of people who will ever actually see it up close.
This is the curious condition of the modern concept car. Long past the prime of in-person auto shows where members of the car-buying public would gawk at futuristic prototypes, the concept car of today sits physically in near isolation, more an image for social media than a social experience. Concept cars are both more and less visible now, and their long-established brand-building purpose is in question.
But as visions of the future, they are increasingly important crystal balls. During my recent visit to GM’s main design facilities, it was clear that concept cars like the CX are more than just sneak previews for thirsty car collectors. With growing competition from emergent automakers in China, the on-again-off-again embrace of electric vehicles in the U.S., and a long tail of industry-wide uncertainty connected to the Trump administration’s tariffs, the automotive industry is in one of its most dynamic periods in recent memory.
Concept cars like the CX offer car designers a concrete aspiration for what they and the company want the future of cars to look like. “If you don’t create the beacon,” says Bryan Nesbitt, GM’s new senior vice president of global design, “you just spin and spin and spin.”
These conditions explain why, depending on how you count, GM released three or four versions of a concept Corvette in 2025 alone.
Under the watch of Michael Simcoe, the recently retired GM design chief, the company embarked on a multi-studio design effort to create new visions for the venerable Corvette sports car brand, which first launched in 1953. Simcoe called on three separate GM design studios around the globe to reinvent the Corvette for the age of waning internal combustion engines, increasing electric power, and not-so-distant autonomous driving.
The first to be made public came from a recently opened studio outside Birmingham, England, which revealed an all-electric version of the famed muscle car with a sharp Batmobile nose, a smooth Shinkansen windscreen, and bulbous fenders. Another version was developed at GM’s Advanced Design studios in Pasadena, California, with a more snakelike appearance and street-racing vibe.
The jet-age concept I saw up close at GM’s suburban Detroit campus, named the CX, was also adapted into a frighteningly powerful hybrid electric twin-turbo V8 race car. Painted with a bright yellow racing livery and equipped with a specialized steering wheel ready for extreme, possibly unwise speeds, it’s co-branded with the video game Gran Turismo.
These four concepts, while not wildly different from one another, suggest a range of possible new directions for one of GM’s most valuable brands, covering everything from the exterior contours to the materials in the chassis to the audible rumble a muscle car should make when it doesn’t even have an internal combustion engine.
For GM, Corvette concepts have become rare and strategic milestones in a business that primarily revolves around the incremental improvements of the model-year marketing approach. Previous Corvette concepts came out in 2009, 2002, and 1992, and each went on to influence one of the eight generations of production Corvettes sold to the general public, as well as car design writ large.
The 1992 concept included an early example of a rearview camera, now essentially a standard feature in new cars. The 2002 concept had a carbon fiber engine bay, testing lighter structural materials to boost performance. The 2009 concept’s design leaned flashy, with scissor doors and a cockpit-like interior, but did arguably more as a brand-building tool when the car was featured as one of the main characters in the 2009 movie Transformers: Revenge of the Fallen. Each concept is a one-off drivable piece of confidentially expensive R&D.
Standing next to the CX in the executive showroom at GM’s Design West building, Phil Zak, executive design director for the Chevrolet brand, assures me the car is wholly a conceptual project. GM did have a period in the late 1980s and early ’90s when the production vehicles that went to market looked almost indistinguishable from the cars the company had put out as concepts a few years prior.
But Zak says the CX is a preview of C9, the ninth-generation Corvette that is rumored to debut with its first model in 2029. Undoubtedly there’s a connection, though; the CX and the three other new Corvette concepts will
Related News
- Risks of Hiring Individuals as Sales Representatives
- British troops authorised to board Russian shadow fleet tankers
- Extent of Cyclone Narelle damage revealed as govt makes big update
- Gov’t unveils 3-year road map for AI, 6G push
- Trump says the Iran war is over. So why won’t he end it?
- Why China’s fight on air pollution has slowed