Winter has arrived with a vengeance, and it has already claimed its first victim.
We went over the ins and outs of winter driving yesterday. Although we’re paraphrasing drastically, you can summarize our tips as follows: drive slowly, install winter tires, and prepare for the worst. In fact, just avoid driving in the winter entirely if at all possible.
Obviously, that’s not an option when you have to drive to work, but you can still take precautionary steps to mitigate the worst of winter’s wrath.
However, no matter what precautions you take, winter will claim its victims every year. This year, one of the first to fall is a brand new C8-gen Corvette Stingray straight from the heart of GM’s testing region.
This sad footage comes courtesy of a Jalopnik reader named Michael who caught this black C8 turned around backward on I-75 North in downtown Detroit. Since the car is facing the wrong way, we can only assume it spun out of control and wound up inverted on a busy Michigan highway.
Why did this Corvette spin out? We have no idea, but a car with close to 500 horsepower and rear-wheel-drive is just naturally a poor performer in winter weather. Monday saw quite a bit of snow in Michigan, and with the C8 Stingray’s low ground clearance and thin tires, even a little bit of snow on the roads can be catastrophic.
It’d be interesting to know if GM even has winter tires available for the C8 Corvette yet.
Given the fact that the UAW strike has caused the 2020 Stingray’s arrival to be delayed, this particular Corvette is certainly not a customer vehicle. It’s likely a test prototype from GM, perhaps even one tasked with acquiring data on winter driving capabilities. If so, we can safely say that the new Corvette isn’t exactly a great winter vehicle.
To be fair to the driver, this is not the first 2020 Corvette to find itself in dire straights. A Corvette test mule was pretty much totaled in California last summer after it struck an SUV rounding a bend in Yosemite.
(Source: Jalopnik)