Finding the LOST Electric Corvette Prototype From 1992

UPDATE: The Corvette's new owner has it moving under its own power! Follow his progress on Instagram:   / electracorvette  

In the early 1990s, a small team at Motorola working in total secrecy pulled off the unthinkable: building a real electric Chevy Corvette, long before GM figured out how. Then, it vanished—until we found it 30 years later.

In this video, we lay out the untold story of how Motorola—the company that made the radio Neil Armstrong took to the moon and literally invented the cell phone—developed an advanced electric vehicle with technology decades ahead of its time, then killed the project before anyone outside the company found out.

It’s not an overstatement to say that Motorola’s electric Corvette could’ve changed the world. Imagine if instead of the GM EV1, the first EV to make a public splash was a sleek red C4 Corvette with 400 hp and swappable batteries. Imagine if automakers today had the benefit of 30 years of powertrain and controller development by one of the world’s most powerful technology companies.

Still, Motorola’s Corvette is an incredible example of what can happen when smart people are given the freedom to try amazing things. That’s something we’d do well to remember, even if the result here was almost forgotten.

“What we did was really nothing compared to what was and what still is possible,” Bob Gerbetz, the car’s powertrain engineer, told us.

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