The greatest American sports car ever built is the Chevrolet Corvette.
The Corvette has a following across the United States and around the world. Generations have embraced the Corvette as one of the hottest sports cars ever built on any continent.
The Chevrolet Corvette is a sports car first manufactured by Chevrolet in 1953. It is built today exclusively at a General Motors assembly plant in Bowling Green, Kentucky, U.S.A.. It was the first all-American sports car built by an American car manufacturer. The National Corvette Museum is also located in Bowling Green, Kentucky.
The Corvette is widely regarded as "America's Sports Car". For more than 50 years, Corvettes have combined very powerful engines and affordability, especially when compared with more prestigious marques of similar performance. Older generations of the Corvette have been criticized for being crude and lacking in refinement by European sports car standards, and their on-limit handling is a divisive issue garnering both praise and reproach. Recent generations of the Corvette, however, are widely seen as being much improved in these areas.
Corvettes tend to emphasize simplicity over technical complexity. Where nearly all competing marques rely on smaller displacement, more complex and faster-revving engines, the Corvette uses a simpler overhead valve (OHV) design coupled with a larger displacement to make up for the lower rev limit push-rods impose. The result is usually cheaper to manufacture and maintain. Another example of this philosophy is the continued use of transverse leaf springs in the suspension. This is judged as a lack of sophistication by some automotive purists, and has fueled the aforementioned "lack of refinement" argument.