When the Chevrolet brand announced its departure from the European market back in 2013, few predicted that there would one day be a bright side to all the job losses, factory closures and general doom and gloom of GM’s slow retreat from our continent.
One, admittedly, only for a select few sports car enthusiasts to really appreciate, but a bright side of a sort. It is the eighth-generation Chevrolet Corvette: the first car in this American sporting icon’s seven-decade history to be offered in right-hand-drive form.
If Chevrolet was still plugging away selling the Captivas, Aveos, Orlandos and other bargain-priced family cars that Europe’s motoring population is already beginning to forget, you can bet that it couldn’t now justify selling a V8-engined sports car that would inflate its fleet emissions statistics.
Luckily for the vastly smaller operation that GM Europe has now become, European emissions regulations on small-scale car distributors are more lenient than they are on larger ones.
