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Hemmings Motor News has been around since 1954. We're proud of our heritage, but we're also more than the Hemmings full of classifieds that your father subscribed to. Aside from new editorial content every month in Hemmings, we have three monthly magazines: Hemmings Muscle Machines, Hemmings Classic Car and Hemmings Sports and Exotic Car.

While our editors traverse the country to find the best content for those magazines, we find other oddities related to the old-car hobby that we really had no place for - until now. With this blog, we're giving you a behind-the-scenes look at what we see and what we do during the course of putting out some of the finest automotive magazines you'll ever read.

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The Four-Seat Corvette That Wasn't

Posted December 30, 2009 12:01 AM by dstrohl

Anybody who ever compared the early histories of the Corvette and Thunderbird had to wonder, if only briefly and for the exercise of thought, whether Chevrolet at least considered a four-seater Corvette after Ford found much success with the four-seater 1958 Thunderbird.

For those wonderers, here's your answer, courtesy Michael Lamm, writing in SIA #60, December 1980. And a bonus article from the same issue, as Marc Stern profiles the 1/6-scale Simplexes that Ed Roy built.

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Re: The Four-Seat Corvette That Wasn't

12/30/2009 6:26 PM

I always felt that the so called 4 seater (seats in the back) was put in to lower the insurance. ei premiums are high for sports cars that seat two as compare to sports cars that seat 4 (even though the 3rd and 4th seats are not very ergonomic.

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Re: The Four-Seat Corvette That Wasn't

12/30/2009 11:00 PM

From what I remember, the 1958 TBird was not all that successful. In fact, if Ford had continued the two seater, GM would have likely discontinued the Corvette because from 1955 - 1957 the TBird was outselling Corvette on the order of 5 - 10/1. With that change in 1958 Ford gave new life to the Corvette and essentially turned over the domestic sports car market to GM. I have owned a couple of Corvettes (and still drive one) but the 1955 TBird was one fine-looking car (without the continental kit).

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