Is the 2025 Chevrolet Corvette E-Ray the Quickest Corvette?
- It’s not quite the fastest, but the E-Ray’s 655-horsepower hybrid drivetrain puts it right in the middle of the Corvette lineup in terms of straight-line performance, with a 0-60 mph run that beats both the standard Stingray and the Z06.
What Does the 2025 Chevrolet Corvette E-Ray Compete Against?
- In terms of direct analogs, there isn’t much in the E-Ray’s price range. The recently hybridized Porsche 911 Carrera GTS is the closest match, but it comes with a price that’s nearly $60,000 higher.
Remember the Corvette E-Ray? Not that it’s a thing of the past, just with all of the recent headlines focusing on the Corvette ZR1 and new ZR1X’s performance on the famed Nurburgring racetrack — along with the sustained hype of the wild ’n’ wonderful Z06 — the E-Ray seems a bit underdiscussed for a 655-hp, mid-engine V-8 hybrid supercar.
Yes, supercar. Beyond the E-Ray’s supercar-standard 2.5-second 0-60 mph scramble, good luck convincing regular passersby that a black-over-orange E-Ray like my test car is any less visually exotic than a similarly black Ferrari 296 or McLaren Artura. The blacked-out E-Ray I drove was downright sinister, with its monochromatic scheme muffling some of the more awkward angles of the C8 Corvette’s profile.
How Is the Corvette E-Ray Different From a Stingray?
The E-Ray’s hybridized drivetrain certainly makes it greener than other versions, but hardware from the Z06 also makes it substantially meaner. The E-Ray cribs the Z’s widebody profile, stretching some 3.6 inches wider than the Stingray and sporting a similarly sharpened front end. Filling the deepened wells are a set of wheels and tires sharing dimensions with the Z06 and ZR1, with the rear rubber smooshing pavement with its 345-width tread.
Related: 2026 Chevrolet Corvette ZR1X: An Electrified Track Monster
Brembo carbon-ceramic discs are standard on the E-Ray, as are Chevy’s fabulous magnetorheological shocks, which are also shared with the Big Z. What you won’t find in the E-Ray, however, is the Z06’s ear-splitting, 5.5-liter flat-plane crankshaft V-8; it’s replaced by the E-Ray’s hybridized 6.2-liter V-8, which represents the current pinnacle of pushrod performance.
In many ways, this is a soft return of the Corvette’s vaunted Grand Sport bloodline: Stingray heart, Z06 weaponry. It’s the Vette to pick for an extended road trip, particularly if either the journey or the destination cuts through squiggled country roads — perhaps somewhere in rural Texas? Maybe … the famed Texas Hill Country? Wow! How’d you guess?
Texas’ automotive press fleet rarely offers up anything hotter than a pickup truck’s top trim, so when I had a chance to pilot an E-Ray, there was no way I was going to tether it to Dallas’ sprawling urban grid, which is just one great latticework of concrete — all right angles and highway until you’re well into the countryside. Honestly, even the flat plains outside the DFW metroplex offer little more than unpoliced straights, so it was seemingly divine providence that my time in the E-Ray fell on the same week I was set to drive some Maseratis at Austin’s Circuit of the Americas.
How Does the Corvette E-Ray Handle Road Trips?
Austin’s tight, overdeveloped and shockingly fractured roads are even worse than Dallas’ grid for exercising a 655-hp, low-nose speed shard, but taking the long way there cut through the heart of the Texas Hill Country. True to its name, this region offers a tableau of evocative Southwestern landscapes, ranging from tree-speckled savannahs to clusters of those eponymous hills. It’s a countryside teeming with active ranches, nature preserves, resorts and limestone manses, and it’s also where you’ll find the state’s finest driving roads, a roiling network of long, lean two-lane blacktop that eventually tangles itself into a dense knot in the hills.
From my family home in Dallas, our chosen route presented us with a solid six hours of driving, the first four of which saw us blaze a trail through a North-Central Texas expanse of featureless grasslands cut suddenly by random pockets of suburbia. It’s hardly exciting, but the E-Ray made planning and preparation as painless as possible with its long legs and large trunk — and, uh, frunk. Chevy remains tethered to the requirement that any Corvette must fit at least one full-size golf bag and its associated accoutrement, and the E-Ray’s stowage is no different from a standard Stingray — outside of an ever-so-slightly narrowed frunk aperture.
The E-Ray’s 12.5 cubic feet of combined cargo capacity, split between the large compartment behind the mid-mounted engine and the small (but usable) frunk, was more than enough for two folks on a three-day adventure. Its controversial split-cabin layout won’t win high marks for proper feng shui, but I’m consistently impressed by how upmarket and reasonably luxe the C8’s interior appointments are. At least in the high-spec configuration of my E-Ray test car, it’s a genuinely primo place to burn through highway miles, with great materials and enough creature-features (including ventilated seats, wireless device charging and Apple CarPlay) to offset both boredom and the early summer heat …
How Quick Is the Chevrolet Corvette E-Ray?
… Or at least the initial summer heat. Piercing sunshine soon gave way to a typical Texas rainstorm, with sheets of fat, grape-size drops nearly flooding the highway and cutting visibility down to a few car lengths. The E-Ray’s massive, low-tread-rating summer steamrollers meant hydroplaning was initially a real concern, but all-wheel drive and the car’s Weather mode meant we cut through the rainstorm with little drama save a very soggy bathroom stop that brimmed our shoes and slicked our clothes.
That has to be the most boring way to set up the E-Ray’s piece de resistance, as the lone electric motor on the front axle exists for stoplight and on-ramp subjugation, not foul-weather hardiness. Chevy claims a ridiculous 0-60 mph low-orbit launch of 2.5 seconds en route to a 10.5-second quarter mile — enough “git” to enter any American highway at speeds best reserved for a banked oval.
Shame, we were fresh out of those. All we could manage was a stretch of rain-free country interstate for our chance to blow-dry the rain streaks — though I’m not sure a hair dryer is an applicable metaphor here. Maybe afterburners? Either way, a full-throttle blast in the most aggressive and alarmingly named Maximum Discharge mode wallops your lower back and striates your neck muscles, and the firehose of power doesn’t drop off until the digital speedometer is deep into [redacted] territory.
What Engine Does the Corvette E-Ray Have?
The E-Ray’s moonshot speed might be a smidge jarring for those already accustomed to the standard C8’s LT2 soundtrack, as the E-Ray’s 6.2-liter V-8 is unchanged versus a Stingray equipped with the Z51 Performance Package. Expect a tidy blend of Z06 pace and visual menace, with the all-American, cheeseburger-and-apple-pie small-block thunder most longtime Vette votaries prefer.
As you probably guessed, we made short work of the longer, emptier sections of road we found, reveling in the LT2’s exceptional ability to settle into a distant rumble when not roused to crack the sound barrier — speed or otherwise. The E-Ray’s long-legged character contrasts with both its appearance and capability, offering a real-world cruising range somewhere in the low 400-mile realm if you stay out of the accelerator.
Then the landscape changed — subtly at first, with the empty grasslands now undulating and speckled with ancient live oaks. Having turned off the interstate, our tarmac was now a coarse, sun-baked two-lane road with frequent cattle guards offering a modest amount of curvature as it meandered through big-buck ranches. Out of Tour and into Sport mode, the E-Ray’s Magnetic Ride Control system stiffens up enough to sharpen composure and cut chassis wallow, but not so much that the cattle guards powdered our spines.
The cadence here was more country than canyon, with much of my energy spent hauling the explosive E-Ray down from long, long straights for a brief section of S curves. It wasn’t until we made it to the legendary Twisted Sisters that the E-Ray felt challenged. The road trio of Texas State Highway Loop 335, 336 and 337 are roundly considered the state’s finest; it’s on these three trails that the Hill Country earns its name, the same heat-treated tarmac now soaring through a series of dramatically rolling knolls that swell to proportions just beneath a small mountain.
How Does the Chevrolet Corvette E-Ray Drive?
Directional changes were now on par with what you’ll find in your average California canyon, and the E-Ray’s mile-wide track and (optional) gluey Michelin Pilot Sport 4S tires were on full — OK, mostly full — attack. The car feels the sum of its parts; face-rippling Z06-light grip with teeth-clenching low-end pull, all with a sense of mass that’s greater than anywhere else in the Corvette lineup. Thanks to its hybrid system, the E-Ray coupe’s base curb weight is nearly 3,800 pounds, some 400 pounds up on a base Stingray coupe. Still, outside of some subtle shift in “background” mass, it’s well offset by the electric motor’s additional 160 hp and standard carbon-ceramic brakes.
Dynamically, there’s not much to say here that I wouldn’t say of a Z51-ified Stingray. It ripped, dipped and zipped through the Twisted Sisters with the incredible approachability and immediate confidence found in all C8s, though certain segments of road were a tad narrow for the squat E-Ray. Still, it doesn’t really drive like a hybrid, particularly when contextualized against hot greenery like the new BMW M5 and Mercedes-AMG C63 S E-Performance. Where most performance hybrids cut the combustion engine at every chance in day-to-day driving, the E-Ray’s relatively tiny 1.9-kilowatt-hour battery offers up around 3-4 miles of silent surface-street cruising before the small-block V-8 sounds-off (unlike a plug-in hybrid, there’s no port to charge the E-Ray’s battery pack).
What’s the Gas Mileage of a Chevrolet Corvette E-Ray?
During standard commuting, you’ll only notice the hybrid system during the impressively smooth spin-up of the engine stop-start system, a feature that can be toggled off (as I did) by a physical button near the driver’s right knee. That, and the V-8 enters and sustains “V4” mode noticeably more than the standard LT2, wherein certain conditions deactivate half the cylinders for a thriftier (and fleeting) four-cylinder cruise.
Wider tires, extra weight and a diminutive battery mean the E-Ray’s EPA-rated fuel economy of 16/24/19 mpg city/highway/combined is slightly worse than a Stingray, dropping 1 mpg on the highway versus the gas-only car. Fair enough, but my indicated 17.7 mpg average over 850 or so miles of highway driving and wanton backroad abuse was modestly impressive, and we were never frustrated at the E-Ray’s thirst.
In fact, we were never frustrated with the 2025 Chevrolet Corvette E-Ray in the slightest outside of having to return the keys at the end of the week. For general purpose grand-touring thrills, the E-Ray is my pick of the diverse C8 Corvette lineup for its approachability, oppressive acceleration and sky-high capability. Once you spec yours, might I suggest you take delivery in Central Texas? There are a few routes I reckon you should check out.
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