Autoblog

By golly, when Bob Lutz wants to make you feel good, he sure knows how to say all the right things. After hitting the pause button on GM's RWD cars -- a gut punch to GM fans waiting for some high horsepower goodies -- Lutz acknowledged the existence of the Blue Devil Corvette for the first time, and told Car and Driver that along with the Camaro, the Blue Devil has escaped the Reaper and is "in the final stages of tuning."

While saying that the development of the car has been challenging, he delivered a number of heartwarming quotables like "This thing has so much power that we have to explore a dynamic envelope that we've never explored before. . . . We're really into a speed and power realm that General Motors has never been in before. We're way up there with Porsche Carrera GTs and Ferraris."

What does that mean? It means more displacement than the Z06's 7.0L V8, but Lutz wouldn't say how much. It means "comfortably in excess of" 600 hp, but not quite 700, which GM's Head of Powertrain, Tom Stephens, says pehaps might come "in the second year." It means 0-to-60 in less than 3.4 seconds. And it means so much torque, Lutz says, that "we're obviously going to have to restrict it because otherwise you get nothing but wheelspin."

Lutz also wouldn't be cornered on an arrival date or the official name of the car, but rumors are 2009 and SS, Z07, or Stingray, along with a $100,000 price tag. Leave it to Bob to deliver that kind of good news on Friday the 13th.

[Source: Car and Driver]

We were excited to announce when Bob Lutz confirmed that GM was working on a higher-performance version of the Corvette. The announcement finally vindicated all those spy shots of a suped-up Corvette test mule, dubbed the "Blue Devil", that was caught undergoing developmental testing for so long. And it gave fans of American muscle something to look forward to in the wake of the new 600-horsepower Dodge Viper.

Now reports are surfacing that the highly-anticipated 600-hp Super-Vette, which is what we called it in the absence of anything more official, will wear the Corvette SS badge. You may recall that after the storied SuperSport badge got diluted with less than SuperSporty products, Chevrolet promised it would only use the name for cars that truly deserved it. We think it's safe to say that the upcoming Corvette SS will be a fitting resurrection of the badge, don't you?

The Corvette SS, which will be known internally as GMX245-SSC (GMX245 is the product code for the C6-generation Corvette), is tipped to make its debut at next year's Detroit show. Some of us here at Autoblog will be cryogenically freezing ourselves until then, we're that stoked.

[Source: Winding Road]