Electrifying the Corvette will be a massive, complex job

There's a lot to unpack as America's sports car — the Chevrolet Corvette — goes electric.

Making the nearly 9,000-pound GMC Hummer EV pickup accelerate to 60 mph in just three seconds and able to travel as far as 329 miles on a charge is a feat in product development and engineering. Kudos to General Motors for pulling it off.

But keeping the 2022 Corvette's current numbers — 0 to 60 mph in 2.9 seconds and the ability to travel more than 400 miles on a tankful of gasoline — will probably be a tougher challenge.

The news that Corvette is going electric, delivered by GM President Mark Reuss, is light on technical details, but it seems unlikely that it will get all-new, EV-specific underpinnings. The car was just redesigned from the wheels up three years ago. Corvette product cycles usually last more than a decade so that GM can spread engineering and development outlays over a longer period.

A Corvette on a separate EV-specific chassis would probably come with a billion-dollar price tag for GM. An electric Corvette will have to be super lightweight and super aerodynamic to keep that sexy 0-60 time and impressive 444-mile cruising range. Such a big investment would be tough to justify for a market segment that is shrinking by the day.

Unless ...

Corvette becomes more than just a sports car. If it becomes a family of vehicles that includes an SUV to take on various Porsches, Lamborghinis and other exotic brands, then an EV-specific architecture for the Corvette might make economic sense. It could live alongside the current-generation Corvette until the clock strikes midnight sometime next decade for the gasoline-powered model.

Here are some photos of the current Corvette's frame and underbody that I shot in July 2019 when GM introduced the latest car in Tustin, Calif. You can see it is not designed like most of today's EVs, which ride on skateboard-type bodies and have battery packs mounted below the floor. The car has a tunnel down the center of the cockpit, and though the underbody is flat, I don't see enough space here to install a beefy battery pack. Can enough Ultium batteries be stuffed into the center tunnel to deliver 300 or so miles of range?

Two areas of the Corvette that do have ample room are the front trunk area and the engine bay behind the driver. The electric powertrain will be smaller than the gasoline engines available now, and engineers will be able to jettison a lot of parts, such as the exhaust system, engine cooling system and eight-speed dual-clutch automatic transmission. You might think that would free up space for batteries.

But weight distribution is critical to sports car handling, so it is highly unlikely that a heavy battery pack will be in the front or the rear of the car.

Reuss says the Corvette will be electrified first starting late next year and then go full-electric later. In a video that GM dropped Monday, we can see the Corvette's first step toward electrification involves an electric front axle. Notice how the front tires are blasting snow roostertails as the car accelerates? That will give the Corvette all-wheel drive for the first time.

With battery space scarce, it's possible GM could use supercapacitors, batterylike devices that are designed for fast, ultrahigh-energy discharges. Supercapacitors would enable the electric motor driving the front wheels to act as a sort of electric turbocharger for a fast blast of power. And supercapacitors would be easier to install than a battery pack.

Technically, we won't know which direction the full-electric Corvette is going until Chevrolet officials dribble out the details. But this much is clear: GM engineers have a whopper of an assignment on their plates now. Corvette fans are going to be taken on a journey as the car evolves.

Still, I wonder if the ride will still be as visceral without the snarling growl of a Chevrolet V-8 engine, a feature of every Corvette built since 1956.