Dave Hill and his team inject the Corvette with Cadillac quality

by Scott Teeters as written for Vette Vues

Dateline: October 2015 – So much has happened in the last 20 years it’s easy to forget that during the early to mid ‘90s, GM was having financial troubles and went through some serious restructuring. At one point the Corvette’s existence was on the line. Fortunately, cool heads prevailed and once again, the Corvette escaped the chopping block.

One of the big problems Corvettes had from the beginning was quality control. The Corvette has always been a premium, Cadillac-priced car, but at times the car’s quality left a lot to be desired. Dave Hill started working for GM in the Cadillac engineering division in 1965, eventually moving into engineering management in the mid-‘70s. Until recent years, Cadillacs weren’t known as “performance cars” like some of the current models, but “quality” was always tops. By late 1995 the C5 was well under way, but needed a Cadillac-quality leader to make sure the C5 was spot on right from the start.

From 1997 to today Corvettes have had quality on the level one would expect from a premium car. The C5 was so good that by 1999 Hill had engineers and designers start their preliminary work on the C6. Another interesting factoid about the C5 is that it has around 1,200 fewer parts! Fewer parts mean fewer things to go wrong. Bravo Dave Hill and the Corvette team! – Scott

The C5 and C6 Corvettes are Dave Hill’s “Corvette children.”

We have signed & numbered art prints of every year and every model C5 and C6 Corvettes available in our safe & secure Amazon store.

The C5 Corvettes are available HERE.

And the C6 Corvettes are available HERE.