2025 Chevrolet Corvette ZR1 Coupe with ZTK Performance Package.
Detroit — General Motors' The latest Chevrolet Corvette will be the most powerful version of the American sports car ever produced — and it's not even close.
The 2025 Chevrolet Corvette ZR1 will feature a twin-turbocharged 5.5-liter V8 capable of producing more than 1,000 horsepower — a first for a Corvette — and 828 pound-feet of torque, the Detroit automaker said Thursday, putting it among the ranks of supercars that can cost hundreds of thousands of dollars.
“This thing pulls like a freight train,” Tadge Juechter, Corvette’s executive chief engineer since 2006, said during a media event. “We expect this to be the fastest car we’ve ever built.”
The most powerful Corvette ever was GM's latest ZR1 for 2019. It produced 755 horsepower and 715 lb-ft of torque from a supercharged 6.2-liter V8.
2025 Chevrolet Corvette ZR1 Coupe with ZTK Performance Package.
General Motors
The new ZR1 will have a “comfortably higher” top speed than the previous Corvette's 212 mph top speed, Juechter said.
General Motors said pricing for the 2025 Corvette ZR1, including the ZTK performance package, will be announced closer to the car’s entry into production next year. The 2019 Corvette ZR1 starts at $121,000.
The ZR1 joins what GM calls the “Corvette family,” which includes the Corvette Stingray, “the everyman’s sports car,” which starts at around $70,000; the E-Ray hybrid; and the Z06 track car, which starts at around $112,000.
“We’re happy with the way things are going,” said Brad Franz, Chevrolet’s director of vehicle and crossover marketing. “This is the next step in this whole approach.”
GM previously confirmed it would introduce an all-electric Corvette, but did not provide a timeframe. A Corvette SUV has also been under consideration for several years. Franz declined to comment on either vehicle.
2025 Chevrolet Corvette ZR1 Coupe with ZTK Performance Package (left) and 2025 Chevrolet ZR1.
Wall Street analysts have said GM could better leverage the Corvette brand by expanding models and, to some extent, sales. In late 2019, Morgan Stanley analyst Adam Jonas said the Corvette sub-brand could be worth between $7 billion and $12 billion.
Chevrolet Corvette sales totaled about 34,500 units each of the past two years. In 2019, the automaker redefined the iconic sports car, swapping the front-engine layout for a mid-engine architecture for increased performance and handling.
Models like the ZR1 are low-volume vehicles designed to generate interest in the brand and lure drivers toward less expensive Corvettes.
“The ZR1 is the leader in its class. It’s the car that gets attention. It’s going to draw a lot of attention to the car and actually help sell other models,” Juechter said. “It’s part of an ongoing business strategy to keep the product relevant over a relatively long life cycle.”
2025 Chevrolet Corvette ZR1
General Motors
Other performance models helped push the average Corvette transaction price to around $106,000.
Franz said the price point is expected to continue to rise with the introduction of the ZR1 and the growth of the track-oriented Z06, which has an average buyer income of $311,000.
Additional sales of the Corvette Hybrid, which starts at about $105,000, are expected to help boost Corvette revenue. GM plans to increase production of the E-Ray to 10 percent of total production capacity from the current 2 percent to 3 percent, Franz said.
The impact of sequential performance has also helped keep the only Corvette plant in Bowling Green, Kentucky, on a double-shift system since 2019.
