General Motors still intends to build a fully electric Chevrolet Corvette, the car’s top engineer said, though he gave no timeline and the company has yet to show a production model four years after first promising one.
“The electric cars are the end game, so someday there will be an electric Corvette,” Tony Roma, Executive Chief Engineer for Chevy Corvette and Performance Cars, told The Drive.
“Someday we will fully electrify Corvette. But not today,” he said.
The remarks mark a shift in tone from July 2025, when Roma said GM had “no plans” for a fully electric Corvette and that Mark Reuss’s 2022 announcement had referred to a hybrid.
Roma Stands by Reuss
Roma was responding to a question about the electric Corvette that GM President Mark Reuss announced in April 2022, alongside a teaser for the hybrid that became the E-Ray.
“Mark did make that statement, you’re not wrong,” Roma said. “The future, as we’ve said publicly as a company, involves electrification heavier and heavier as we go.”
“Someday we will announce something to the world, but yeah, I’m not going to take anything away from Mark’s statement, it stands on its own,” Roma added, in remarks also reported by The Drive.
He declined to say when, repeating that GM does not talk about future products.
What Reuss Promised in 2022
Reuss wrote on LinkedIn on April 25, 2022, that GM “will offer an electrified and a fully electric, Ultium-based Corvette in the future,” according to a copy of the post reported at the time.
GM said the first electrified model would arrive “as early as next year,” and that details would follow later, the Associated Press reported.
That electrified model arrived as the E-Ray, the first hybrid and first all-wheel-drive Corvette.
No fully electric Corvette has been announced since.
‘No Plans’ in 2025
Roma took over as Executive Chief Engineer of GM’s newly formed Global Corvette and Performance Cars team on July 1, 2024, succeeding Tadge Juechter, who led development of the C7 and C8 generations, according to GM Authority.
A year later, at the Goodwood Festival of Speed in Britain, Roma told CarBuzz that “at this point in time, we have no plans to do an all electric Corvette.”
Asked then about Reuss’s 2022 post, he said, “It was about an electrified Corvette, which is the car we’re standing next to.”
“Some people took that and assumed we meant all electric,” he told CarBuzz.
He said the technology was not yet ready to build an electric Corvette “light enough with enough range, with enough capability at a cost point that people could afford.”
“I think it’s going to be a while before you see an all-electric Corvette,” he said at the time.
Reuss himself struck a cautious note three months later, saying on InsideEVs‘ podcast that “an all-electric Corvette that can do what a Corvette is supposed to do is not easy right now.”
“I think it can be done,” Reuss said, pointing to vehicle mass and thermal performance as the hurdles, before adding, “But not yet.”
He said he was not sure “the character of the Corvette, and our buyer of the Corvette,” was ready “quite yet.”
His latest comments leave that timing unchanged but restore an all-electric model as a stated goal.
Hybrids First
GM’s current path runs through hybrids rather than a battery-only car.
For the 2027 model year, the E-Ray has given way to the Grand Sport X, which pairs a new 6.7-liter LS6 V8 rated at 535 horsepower with a front electric motor for a combined 721 horsepower and electric all-wheel drive.
The 1,250-horsepower ZR1X also uses a hybrid system with an electric motor driving the front axle.
Asked whether a hybrid Z06X would make sense, Roma said “I think we could certainly do that,” while stressing he had “nothing to announce today.”
He also played down speculation around GM’s repeated renewals of the Zora trademark, saying GM tends to renew “old names or names that we think are cool, and there’s nothing more than that.”
On the podcast, Roma said GM still has “runway left on C8” and urged buyers not to delay purchases in anticipation of a ninth-generation car.
“The C9 needs to be a Corvette at its core,” he said, adding that it cannot be “more expensive just to use technology for technology’s sake.”
GM’s Wider EV Retreat
Roma’s comments come as GM’s EV sales shrink.
GM sold 25,473 EVs in the US in the third quarter, down 61.7% from a year earlier, as Cadillac made up nearly half of the total and Chevrolet Equinox EV sales collapsed.
The company has recorded $10.9 billion in EV-related charges since the second half of 2025, and Reuss said last month that GM remains “in for the long haul” on EVs, with future spending aimed at architecture rather than new models.
A GM spokesperson said in April that “EVs remain the endgame” for the company, language Roma echoed on the podcast.
