2020 Chevrolet Corvette Stingray production is officially underway

Chevrolet announced today the production line at the Bowling Green, Kentucky, manufacturing facility has whirred to life.

It’s C8 time, baby.

When Chevrolet announced in November that production of the new mid-engine C8 Corvette had been delayed until February 2020 as a result of the United Auto Workers strike, those who had already plunked down their deposits had no choice to sit back and scratch a few more days off their calendars.

It wasn’t just the strike that bore the blame, either. Necessary retooling at the factory, the need to hire and train another shift, and a backlog of final C7 orders all conspired to push what we’d all waited more than 50 years for just a bit further out of reach.

But no more. With the assembly line up and running, customer orders finally taking shape—and color and trim and options galore. While early experts described the C8 as missing that final skosh of refinement, we doubt many customers will feel the same way. They’ll likely be just plain excited to get their hands on one, even if they had to grovel at the feet of dealers to get their allocation.

As with the traditional model cadence, the line is only churning out the Stingray coupes at the moment. Production of convertibles should begin soon after. While these will undoubtedly offer outrageous levels of performance in their own right, we’re excited to see the higher-performance C8s that are undoubtedly on their way. We’ve already seen mules out testing that sound more like the flat-plane-powered C8.R than the LT2-powered small-block we’ve come to love.

Do you have a C8 Corvette on the way? Do you wish you did? Let us know in the Hagerty Forums.