2014 Corvette is the Most Fuel-efficient Premium Sports Car

The 455-horsepower V8 engine can deliver 30 mpg highway in Eco mode.

By Douglas Newcomb

 

Talk about having your cake and eating it too, or, in this case, having your horsepower and less frequent fuel fill-ups too. Because the 2014 Corvette Stingray can achieve an EPA-estimated 17 mpg city/29 mpg highway, Chevrolet said this will make it the most fuel-efficient sports car on the market when it goes on sale this fall.

 

It’s the only sports car that offers 455 horsepower and delivers 30 mpg highway in Eco mode.

 

The 17/29 estimate is for the 2014 Corvette Stingray equipped with a new 7-speed manual transmission, while the driver-selectable Eco mode helps it get up to 30 mpg highway. An Active Fuel Management system that disables half the cylinders of the Corvette's 6.2-liter V8 engine for enhanced fuel economy is activated only in Eco mode.

By comparison, the 3.8-liter 400-horsepower 6-cylinder engine in the 2014 Porsche 911 Carrera S delivers an EPA-estimated 27 mpg highway, although it does get 19 mpg city and 22 combined. But other manual-transmission 400-plus-horsepower sports cars – particularly those from Chevy’s domestic rivals – don’t come close.

 

The 2013 Dodge Challenger SRT8 equipped with a 392-cubic-inch 470-horsepower Hemi V8 gets 14 mpg city/23 mpg highway and 17 combined, while the 2014 Ford Mustang Shelby GT500 with a 5.8-liter V8 engine that produces a massive 662 horsepower has an EPA rating of 15/24/18. Certainly, other sports cars, such as the Subaru BRZ, achieve higher numbers, but when it comes to spending $50,000 and up, nothing else matches the Corvette.

The 2014 Corvette Stingray’s highway rating is an 11 percent increase over the previous model year, even though the new LT1 V8 delivers a 6 percent increase in horsepower over the previous base Corvette engine. When equipped with a 6-speed automatic transmission, the Corvette Stingray’s Active Fuel Management is active in all drive modes, except when the driver engages the manual shift via the steering-wheel paddles. (Fuel-economy estimates for Corvette Stingrays equipped with the 6-speed automatic haven’t yet been finalized.)

“The Corvette Stingray establishes the benchmark for modern performance cars by using technologies to deliver more performance and more miles per gallon,” Tadge Juechter, executive chief engineer for the Corvette, said in a statement. “We expect more and more performance cars will follow Corvette’s example.”

[Source: General Motors, EPA]