Since I received my ERay allocation — and now have an official order at the assembly plant ready to be built — people have been asking me lots of questions about my build specs. Things like, "What color are you getting?" and "Did you get body color trim or Carbon Flash like comes standard on the Z06?" Considering all the options we can choose on these cars, there must be millions of different combinations, so it's a great opportunity to really make your Corvette your own and get it that way right from the factory! In this post, I'll present some of my considerations and why I chose what I chose.
Convertible or Coupe
For me, this choice was an easy one, but not everyone has the same use case, so there's no one right answer that's best for all C8 Corvette buyers. If you want to be able to easily see your engine, you'd want a Coupe. I owned my C8 Stingray Convertible for two years and drove it 16,000 miles, but I never saw the engine, and I was able to check my oil without doing so. I didn't take the time to remove the 18 screws and lift the cover off to see my 6.2L V-8, but I know there was a very powerful engine in there because when I mashed the gas pedal, great things happened.
I like engines, and they can be fun to look at, but I have no interest in keeping my engine compartment clean enough that I'd want to show it off. Some people like to do that, though, and there's actually a new engine cover with a window for 2024 that can be ordered for Convertibles, but the tonneau cover still needs to be raised to see the engine through it.
Coupes are a bit lighter, so if one of the main reasons you bought a C8 is to race it on a track, that extra weight is certainly a consideration. You can still take the Coupe top off manually and stow it in the trunk. You just lose trunk space while the top is off, which doesn't happen with a Convertible. For an extra $7000, you can have the convenience of pushing a button and having the car transformed into a drop-top in about 16 seconds — even while driving — and that makes the Convertibles very convenient, so that's what I ordered.
Body Trim Colors
This is an interesting one. Z06 Corvettes come standard with Carbon Flash exterior accents, and the ERay comes with body-color accents. You can see in this photo that those accents are a major color component of the car, as they appear in several places on a C8 Corvette. Thankfully, with ERays, you can have either with no extra charge. On the Stingray and Z06, it's $995 extra to get body-color exterior accents.
It's a highly subjective personal preference, but I've grown to like the look of the trim on the side intakes when it's the same as the body color of the vehicle. It's more subtle, but a big consideration is also the color of the car, as obviously the Carbon Flash (GM's term for black metallic) stands out more on a light-colored car than on darker ones, which is why I've used renderings of white C8 Corvettes from Chevrolet's "Build and Price" tool to most clearly illustrate this point.
Even though I'm fine with the body-color trim on the sides of the C8, I wasn't sure I wanted it on the front and back of the car. I know that many would never sully their beautiful Corvette by putting a license plate on the front of it, and some states don't require it. As it turns out, the "Live Free or Die" state of NH does require a front plate, and even though I could very likely still get away without putting one on, I'm getting a vanity plate that I want people to see, so what a license plate looks like on the front of my ERay is a consideration for me.
On the ERay and Z06, body-color trim wraps around the front and extends down past the nose of the car in front of the center radiators. There's a panel that can be removed for license plate mounting (and/or for extra air flow), so a plate can be nicely tucked in there and doesn't look too bad, but I wondered about breaking up the body-color trim with a plate rather than having a solid black background (like I had on my Stingray) on which to mount it.
Another consideration was the back of the car. I've never been able to get used to having body-color vents on the rear bumper. And on a Convertible, there's also a vent on the rear hatch that's body color when that option is chosen (see above). Because of those vents and the license plate mounting surface I wanted, I decided to go with Carbon Flash exterior accents, and I also think the front of the car looks more aggressive that way.
Wheels
Here's another one that was super easy to choose. I love, love, love the standard ERay wheels! Since I haven't seen an ERay in person yet, I haven't been able to photograph one, so I'm using another GM rendering to show the wheels I ordered.
I had to actually buy my Stingray before I was able to sit in a C8, and since I'll be getting one of the first ERay Corvettes produced, it's quite likely that I won't see one of those until I go to the dealership to pay for mine and see it for the first time! That's ok. I know it'll be great!
Trim Level
Whether you choose a 1LZ, 2LZ or 3LZ determines, in part, what other equipment and options are available to you. For instance, a 1LZ comes with the 10-speaker Bose sound system, and you must upgrade to at least 2LZ to get 14-speakers. If you want some of the fancier interiors, you need to go with a 3LZ trim. Some people want to save weight, and some want all the luxury and convenience options they can get. Luckily, since I'm on a budget, I'm happy being somewhere in the middle with a 2LZ, and I'm getting a very nice ERay at that price point.
Additionally, I've ordered the black exhaust tips. I had the chrome tips on my Stingray, but the newer black ones have a different shape that I like, and some people think they're louder (the exhaust pipe into them is a larger diameter), so for $395 that's what I went with. Likewise, I changed my Exterior Badge Package choice from the Chrome option I had with my previous Corvette — which looked great on my Rapid Blue Stingray — to the standard Carbon Flash option for my ERay.
It all needs to go together as an entire package, so I've found that changing one thing can affect other choices one might make. It took me over 6 months of research and thinking about it every day to configure my Stingray back in 2020 (they were very new then and information was scarce), but that was during Covid, I needed to wait for an allocation anyway, and I'd recently been laid off, so I had plenty of time alone at home to think about it!
ERay Body and Interior Colors
We've gotten this far, and I haven't said what color I chose for either the interior or exterior of my ERay. That's because I'm not going to — yet. Color is very subjective, and there is no universally right answer (even though some people say, "All corvettes are red. The rest are mistakes.").
It depends upon what you're trying to accomplish. Some people may want a color that doesn't show dirt, so it's easy to keep clean looking. Or you may want a flashy color befitting an exotic sports car, but it may be hard to get exactly what you want. In fact, people criticize GM for not offering colors that some of the European supercar manufacturers do. Of course, there are aftermarket solutions to many of these "first-world problems."
I want to do some sort of "reveal" of my new ERay, and that's the reason I don't want to just tell everyone what colors I've chosen. That would be so boring! I'll try to think of a much more fun way for everyone to learn that very important information... apparently, it's important because people keep asking me about it!
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