How The Corvette C8 Z06 Is Made

In this video, we're going to take you behind the scenes and how the Corvette is built. And it is a rare opportunity to get to talk to the men and women who build this car. We've already done a video on how this vehicle was engineered. We've talked to the chief engineer, we put it up in the lift, we've driven the vehicle. But because of the culmination of everything we've done, we have unique opportunity to go behind the scenes to see how cars are made. So we are going to attempt to, in this video, walk you through how Corvettes are built. After we finished our C8 Z06 video, I was a bit shocked at Jack's affinity for this car. We are sitting in your own vehicle that you watched go down the assembly line, that you talked to the people who built it. Tell me why you wanted to roll the dice on a first generation, first of its kind Corvette I think one of the unique opportunities you and I have in our career is to get to meet many of the men and women who designed various vehicles, whether it be the Porsche GT3, the Nissan Z, the GTR, the Mazda Miata. The thing that struck me after meeting the men and women who built the Z06 is the level of passion they have for this vehicle. It's not just another project. It's not just another Corvette. In many of these people's cases, it is the peak of their career. It's something they will talk about into retirement and it's a dream they've had over their decades long careers and getting to see the level of passion that both the engineers have, but as you're gonna see in this video as well, the passion of the people who are working at the assembly plant have for this product is almost inspiring to be honest. It is a very, very unique product in that regards. And as you're gonna hear from in this video, a lot of the people who work at that factory have wanted to work on Corvettes their entire life. Don Sherman, I'm a general assembly superintendent here, Bowling Green, Kentucky. Been with General Motors for about 13 years now. Started out in Lordstown, Ohio, built my Chevy Cruze. Been with Corvette since C7. Prior to that, I worked at the Corvette Museum for quite some time, late C5, C6. So I've been in and out of this plant since I was about 21, 22. So I did my affinity with Corvettes started very young. My dad showed Corvettes when I was born. So he had a 77 show car that, you know, Ed Roth wrote articles about magazines. I mean, it was a serious show car. So my mom was nine months pregnant with me and they were flatbedding that truck, or the car of course, because he wouldn't drive it. Manhattan, we lived in New York at the time. So he was flatbedding the car to a car show in Manhattan when my mother went to labor and they had to detour to the hospital. So we detoured to the hospital. Mom got there and my dad left my mom there and then proceeded to drop the car off at the conference center and then set it up, of course, because they had chrome undercarriage, right? So he had all that chrome dust. So we had to set everything up. Luckily, he did get back in time for when I was born, which was good. And, you know, he worked at GM at the time, obviously, and he had to pick his son up in a Corvette and the other Corvettes sitting there, you know, on jacks. So he borrowed his General Foreman at the time, worked at GM, he borrowed his 78 Corvette and he picked my poor mother who just had a baby and myself up in a 78 Corvette and drove us home. So, and then of course he drove me home to like, you know, a room with an Eklers Corvette bed that I couldn't yet use for three or four years. I mean, it started really young. We, you know, we showed cars together for a long time. We wound up getting a C4 as well. And then eventually he worked here. I worked the museum, like I told you, for quite some time. Met my wife there, we've been married 15 years. So that's a start. After that, my dad, I'm actually second generation GM employee, so my dad was actually working here for 15, 17 years before he retired. So it was cool, I got a chance to work with him in this kind of format for a few years, which was really neat. Now I've read about Zorro and I read all the stories and Harley Earl and, you know, like Bob Lutz where they're hiding like Kobo Camaros back in like these, you know, CMM rooms and all this like, all this cool stuff. I feel like I get to be a little bit a part, a piece of that history, you know, I get to be a part of the history that I read. Like I got my own little portion of it here, you know, like I remember the first meeting I was at where I heard the word mid-engine and I was like, oh, this is real, like we're doing this, you know, which that word still gives me anxiety. I'm like saying out loud because it was such a big deal to say, you know, mid-engine, but no, there's no, you know, no crazy ending or anything like that. It's just, I eventually got here and I got a company car, that's a Z06, it's pretty cool, you know. So I feel very accomplished. I'm happy where I'm at in life, you know. My name is Jeff Brown and I'm a vehicle system engineer for the Chevrolet Corvette and I've been with GM for five years. I've realized I've been on a collision course for the automotive industry pretty much my entire life. When I was a young kid, my mom would try to point out cars and be like, oh, it's a blue car or it's a car, it's a truck. And I would be like, no mom, that's a Buick or no, that's a Chevy. And she was like, what's wrong with this kid? Where'd you learn this stuff? And I just have always been so passionate towards it. I've also been pretty much a Chevrolet person my entire life. We grew up farming. So every summer all of our support vehicles were Chevy trucks. And that was also during the Lyca Rock era. So to me, the only pickup truck that had any business being on the road was a Chevrolet. That's all I've owned. That's all I still own. So as I kind of reflect on how I'm even here today, it seems pretty inevitable and I really enjoy what I do. And when you first went to Bowling Green to shoot the production, watching this car down the line, what was your overall feeling? Just talking to the people there and then seeing this occur, because this is really rare. Most people will never get to see their car go down a manufacturing line. I think what's changed my perspective on the Corvette more so than anything else is from a manufacturing perspective, you and I idolize cars like the GT3, GT3 RS, GT4 RS, McLarens, Ferraris, and whatnot. The difference between a Corvette and even something like a Miata is the sheer number they produce. If you look at how this car is built and you and I had the opportunity to see how the NSX Type S was built, we've seen how the GT4, GT3 is built. The key difference between those cars and this is the volume of production. And because they can build more of these vehicles, they can amortize their cost over more customers, more people can experience these cars, that's what actually makes these even somewhat affordable. $140,000, $60,000 is a lot of money. But the only reason they are that inexpensive relative to something like a Ferrari is the fact that they can actually build these cars. Well, GM, I think we definitely did it right, in my opinion, I was here for that. Obviously, we got a brand new paint shop, state of the art, brand new body shop. We got brand new cockpit lines, brand new engine assembly lines, brand new skillet system, you know, in GA. We got, we did everything essentially from the ground up, no expense spared, the right way. You know, I started building Corvettes here in 84. So, C4 to C5 changed quite a bit, but C6 to C7, the actual infrastructure was pretty similar. You know, so it was a drastic change. You know, we invested a lot and we think it paid off. We consolidated the paint panels to try to arrive as late in the process as possible, because we don't want to get mutilated, right? We want to put them as far back in the process as possible. So, we created a delivery system that sends our paint panels actually to skillet at the very end of it, like I said, before chassis three, before the car gets its wheels essentially. Skillet system is basically a conveyor, a platform that the operator can walk onto and ride and perform the work on the car as it's actually moving. So, there's no loss of time, the car never stops. And actually, as the car goes up and travels up and down for ergonomics, depending on the height of the operator. And that was a big process change for us. You know, before we had several different conveyors, we made cockpit online on change, not skillets. I mean, the skillet system was probably the biggest additional. You know, I had a brand new body shop for C7, brand new body shop. And I built another one for C8, right next to it. You know, both running at the same time, incredible. You know, it had to be right. Latest technology, everything had to be right. But initially, it starts out in body shop and paint shop. So, paint shop paints a panel set, essentially versus a full car, if you will, like most plants do, right? So, they paint this set and the set is sent out to multiple places throughout the plant, obviously for assembly. At the same time, the body's being built. Aluminum body's being built, sent over to get E-coated, then brought back for some composite panels. That's body shop. Body shop then sends the car over to GA, my neck of the woods, and we start over and trim. So, all this is going on and it sounds simple, but you got cockpits being built, you got drivetrain being built, all that's being built while the car is coming over to trim. So, once the car gets over to a trim shop, you get the glass installed, the cockpit, like I said, the carpets and that type of internal trim to the interior there. And then the car goes over to chassis. And then that's where actually a lot of people hear the term marriage or it's one of the most popular spots in our tour there is when the body actually marries to the drivetrain and the suspension and the cradles actually bolt up to the body. So, then the car gets married and it goes over to chassis and all the underbody and arrows done there. Everything under the car is shot. And it goes over to our skillet system, where it's dense with people. You guys see it when you walk through, very lot going on. A lot of panels are getting installed at that point or getting fitted at that point. Car's starting to actually look like a car at that point. So, it goes through the skillet system and it goes over to the chassis. Last chassis, chassis three, and that's where we get the wheels, get hung for the first time. Obviously in the floor, the car actually hits the ground for the first time. You get fluid fills and then of course the green start, the first car start. And it comes over to final line where you do your final fits, final checks, and goes over to dynamic testing. I made that sound very simple, but obviously this whole process takes a lot longer. About two days for that whole process to go through the actual, the entire system. All the same quality control aspects, all the same quality control plans. We still use all that here. However, there's the obvious differences. One is option content. I mean, this car is incredibly, incredibly difficult to build. A ton of options, whether you have CO7 packages, whether you have different color emblems, different types of leather, different types of seats that we were talking about. So, what that requires is essentially a massive amount of air-proofing, automation. I mean, we have from low-tech, archaic air-proofing to the most high-tech you can come up with here. No matter what it takes to get that in the customer's hands the right way, how they want it built, we do that here in Bouldering Assembly. But it takes time, it takes manpower. What's different? Well, the four-minute cycle time is different for a GM facility. Some of our competitors build offline and have no timeline. Essentially, we don't. We stick to our four-minute cycle time. So, that's one of the big differences. Another big difference is the fact that we paint composite panels. We paint composite panels. We paint them separate from the car itself, right? So, we paint the panels as a set, and the panels get delivered, but then the panels gotta be installed. So, you have these freshly painted panels, right? They gotta be installed, handled, and not be delayed in the process of them fit. Like, when I was building the Chevy Cruze, we'd fit the doors and body shop. Raw metal, fit them right there. So, the whole process lends itself to be completely different just starting with the panels alone. Complexity proliferation really is the biggest thing we have to battle around here. People ask, they're like, how can a car be so expensive? I always counter, how can it only cost that much? I really think that every car that we build is a miracle. There's so much integration. There's a global supply chain that has to feed a car at a specific moment that we basically call two to three weeks in advance, right? So, to bring all of that together with all these different options, you can just imagine that completely proliferates the challenges that we have to deal with, and it makes it harder, but that's what we have to do. There's no other way we go about it. I think it's hard to put in perspective for the common person that when you hear manufacturing or assembly, you think that Chevy or GM, they make every single part for this. And traditionally, almost every single car that we touch these days has a minimum of 50 different suppliers for different parts. We're talking about transmissions. We're talking about bolts and fasteners, shock absorbers. Every little detail of the car is no longer manufactured in-house. So, part of the complication of having all these different suppliers is somehow scheduling and obtaining all these parts from all these different areas at once to build a car in one facility. Now, there's the backend part of that as well. Predictive software and algorithms to connect with dealerships, to online websites, to know when to trigger these suppliers to ship X amount of parts to this location. Wheels, tires, trucks have to be there. But can you clarify a bit the difference between manufacturing and assembly for this plant? So, let's be clear. Bowling Green Assembly Plant is a assembly facility. This plant has existed since the early 80s. It has a little over 1,200 employees and it covers 212 acres. And it is where the Corvette is put together. To assemble a C8 Corvette, either Stingray, E-Ray, or Z06, it takes about a day and a half or three complete shifts for a single C8 Z06 or standard C8 or E-Ray to be assembled. On a good day, the total plant output is approximately 200 cars. The only thing that is physically, let's call it built there, is the aluminum substructure of the vehicle, essentially the aluminum chassis. They take pre-made sub-assemblies and weld them all together there in their body shop or the Bowling Green Assembly body shop where they use hundreds of feet of adhesive, screws, and welds to put together the aluminum substructure where then it is sent down the assembly line where body panels go on, door trim, seats, and drivetrains. The drivetrain's a good example of how the assembly process works. This is a just-in-time facility which means the global supply chain has to get the parts there days before they go into the vehicle. And the drivetrain, whether it be the LT2 that's found in the base Stingray and the upcoming E-Ray, is sent in from the Tondawanda Engine Facility out of state. However, things like the LT6, the upcoming LT7 and other future engine variants, or like the current LT4, are built on site in the Performance Build Center where a few engine builders come together and build these limited production engines. While 200 cars a shift does not sound like a lot of vehicles going down the line, what people seem to forget often is not only are these cars complicated to build from an overall engineer's perspective, they are also highly customizable. Compare this to something like a GR Supra where those cars are essentially mono-spec in comparison. The Corvette, you can pick different body styles. You can be convertible, a coupe. You can pick different overall trim levels, whether it be the upcoming E-Ray, the CO6, or a standard Stingray. And on top of that, there's a wide variety of trim levels and color packaging options. You can even override GM's manufacturing colors. So if you wanted to say, do a brown exterior with a red interior, you could do that. You could pay GM several hundred dollars to override their color spec. So you can essentially build within reason a fully customized car, which further adds a level of complexity to the C8 manufacturing. So as a vehicle systems engineer, it's a pretty comprehensive role. I specifically focus within the chassis and active thermal spaces. So all of those components on the car, I'm responsible to ensure that they're launched correctly and also ensuring that everything already on the car is working as we expect and also driving any change that we need to. So it's so fun because I get to collaborate with all of our best and brightest across the parts of the car that I find the most interesting, right? The brakes, the suspension, the steering, the structure, all the stuff that I really went to school for. Corvette's really unique. So it's still part of the Chevrolet family. So we still have over a hundred years experience building cars globally at scale. So that's how we have the skillset to be experts at building this at volume and getting this in the hands of more customers than many of our competitors are able to do. And it's so cool to walk down the line and see the complete variety of cars that are built and are spec'd. We've leveraged the C8 architecture like no other Corvette in this past. We have right-hand drive variants. We're exporting this car across the world. All of those different regions have different requirements that we have to accommodate. And coming from largely truck, if there's something that goes down, you might have the opportunity to sort of stop the bleeding a little bit with different options that you can introduce. In the meantime, we have one car that we have to get all of the parts on just in time with no margin for error. And understanding the immensity of that really brings everyone together to build the car and to make sure that no, nothing is missed and that all the details are understood in that. When it came to specking out my own vehicle, honestly, the purchasing process of a Corvette is very, very similar to most other, let's call it more boutique style cars. You sit down with your new car manager, in my case, it was a Castle Chevrolet McHenry. I sat down with him. I went, all right, this is my spec that I would like. Because I have no imagination, this is the same color as my C7. But this time around, I went with the Werther's original tan interior or this butterscotch interior because I thought blue over tan would have been cool. But what's unique about Corvette versus a more commodity sports car or even some of the more boutique brands is GM has almost an immediate feedback loop from their customers. Because you have the option to do the museum delivery. So right by the Bowling Green facility, there is the Corvette Museum where you can take a tour of the history of Corvette and you can get a tour of the manufacturing facility arranged. And because of that, the engineering team at GM can immediately hear from customers what they want, what they don't want, how these vehicles are being ordered. And they can directly from word of mouth hear from their customers of what options they want in the future, which is very, very unique. Yeah, it is unique. Basically to any other sports car that we look at in the modern age. And I know you brought up the GR Supra, but a lot of these sports cars that we enjoy, like you feel like you're just shouting into the clouds if you have a problem. It's just, they make it, they disappear. Like once the media cycle's over, it's like, that's it. You don't know if they're really working on the background to make any improvements or how they hear. But that's the one thing I found interesting about the Corvette team. They're really engaged in like the forums and like, to your point, it's just brilliant that they can use the museum delivery as a way to interact with customers, getting them in the factory. It's one of the best parts about this experience, even though this wasn't my car and I'm not like Miss Johnny Corvette, but going to the factory to see it, I have a much better appreciation for why people love this thing and the potential future owners of what they can look forward to. If you look at what Porsche does in the LA Experience Center or the Atlanta Experience Center, it is very special for customers, but you don't have engineers, they're captive talking to the customers. They're talking to salespeople and product specialists. It's not the same thing. That's essentially just pulling a sheet off and talking. You're not seeing the people that are involved in making it. That's what makes this different. And it's special because if you're born and raised here in the United States, like this is peak. I mean, if you're into cars, like actually going to be able to see where a car is made is like just amazing. It really is. It makes you realize that again, cars are made for people by people and it takes a dedicated work staff, but you forget very quickly that these cars are built over a long period of time. Car projects take in some case, in this vehicle's case, almost a decade to come to fruition. It's countless, countless hours by dedicated engineers. And on top of that, it's people whose livelihoods revolve on whether or not these cars are built. The factory workers. Admittedly, one of the biggest responsibilities that I own with this job is conveying the needs of the manufacturing facility back to our engineering teams. You can imagine when you're only looking at the car, your focus is the car. So you're gonna have a no compromise attitude to putting whatever content on it you need to be the best. And that's where I have to remind everyone, hey, yes, of course, but remember how we actually have to put the car together next to the cars that we've already been building for some time. So here in Bowling Green, Kentucky, obviously we build all Corvettes. So your base Corvettes, your Z51 Corvettes, and now your Z06s. And from the introduction of the powertrain, the engine and transmission marriage down the general assembly lines, you'll see every variant that we build back to back. And we have to be robust to that, that everyone that we put in each of the different footprints has the skill and the knowledge to put whatever car that we put in place together. So attack time is the amount of time they have to perform their job, their complete job and their footprint. Essentially that car will travel for four minutes in front of that operator. And if they're not done in four minutes, it will stop. So most of their cycle times, the amount of work they do is typically like, you know, three minutes and 50 seconds or 57 seconds or what have you. That is the big thing in Bowling Green is that like most of our other plants, you know, my last plant was 57 seconds. I mean, those cars are moving. Don't walk in front of the conveyor. You know, this one, I have to stare at a fixed object to make sure it's still moving. You know, I mean, sometimes. So it's certainly a lot slower pace, you know, a lot less cars, obviously, you know, annually, right? But again, a lot more content, you know, a lot more content is what drives those job cycles. Yeah, they're doing the amount of work, you know, easily four times the work that you would see in a normal facility or our truck facilities. If you were to miss a day at work, right, someone doesn't know your job, it's not uncommon to have to put two, three people on a job and try to figure out how to get it going. This plant does have, we call them knack jobs, knack three, whether that's welding or fitting a car that are more critical to the car itself. So this plant, I will say, has a lot of those jobs. Like the whole fit process itself is very, very layered. So like in the morning I have a list and I'll check certain job stations to make sure those same players are on those jobs because if they aren't, you know, when we don't put the right people behind them, we could have some major issues in fit or mutilations or you name it. So this plant does, most plants, the 60 second tack time, that just drives a very basic job, right? You only have 57 seconds to do something. Four minutes, you can get really creative. You know, we do. And that leads to, like I said, it just leads to a different dynamic regarding, I don't know if it's more of a skilled process, but it's just a lot of a greater quantity of just knack type jobs. Now, because we know that every single iteration of the C8 goes down the same line, that doesn't mean it's the same process to build each one of these cars. They require and have unique challenges to them, namely the Z06. So if you were standing there as a observer, you will literally watch a convertible go down the same line as a right-hand drive export model with somewhere like the UK or the Middle East, as a Z06, as a Z06 convertible and all the future cars. And the same assembly personnel who are putting in seats and suspension components have to go from one task to the next and not be interrupted in their process. In terms of creating new iterations, like the Z06 or the E-Ray, there's gonna be unique challenges. And even like a car like the Z06, you would think, okay, well, how hard is it? But it took a lot of work on the backend to get all the workers up to speed in terms of development, planning, and then to actually make that work. First of all, it's, I believe what I'm saying is correct, that this has the most panels that differ from a base car ever, that differ from a variant Corvette. Like the ZR1 had a few different body panels, but the Z06 has wider quarters, wider doorings, wider fenders, fascias. I mean, it's loaded up. So there's a lot of content. So the content drives, certainly there's more work, more actual jobs added to actually compensate for the changes in the variability of the car. At the basic level, believe it or not, the parts are a lot bigger, which drives a lot more fasteners, which makes it a little bit more difficult to handle, like a wheelhouse liner, for example. I mean, they have to wrestle the Z06. It's wider, shoot one side, the other side pops out. You know, it's just, it's some of those cumbersome parts that are a little bit different for the Z06, but really it's new content. I mean, it's really just basically new content that I'm introducing to the mix where you already have to learn right-hand drives, stingrays, exports, you know, so it's just new content that we haven't seen that much. Do we do validation builds? Sure, GM gives us plenty of validation builds, which is great because it gives us the opportunity to practice, you know, without having to worry about the line shutting down, that type of thing. The sub-assemblies, like I said, we've adapted, you know, we've added people where people need to be at. That's the biggest thing. I mean, when you have manpower inputs, you're adding costs to the car and essentially the cost to the customer, right? So with this car being what it is, you know, a supercar, right, at the price point that it's set at, you need to make sure you're doing everything you can to try to keep to that tag time or cycle time or, you know, just make it, make it where it needs to be financially, right? So that's our goal at the very basic level. Another challenge we overcame on this car that really highlights how you balance engineering the car from an ideal product perspective, but also understanding your manufacturing constraints and needs is the Bafflon, the auxiliary radiator. So essentially this is the piece that seals the side radiators within the housing and the opening on the side of the car. And from a ceiling perspective, you'd make it as big and as intrusive as you could to completely seal it off to make sure you maximize the airflow over the radiator. We've certainly done that. We haven't compromised that performance at all, but initial Bafflon designs were really hard to put in the car. It was just hard to push it, install it, get that retention, and it was exhausting work. I knew that because I did it. You know, having the opportunity to go over to that station and try and be like, is this really a problem? And be like, yeah, this is a problem. I wouldn't be happy doing this all day. So again, I'm not going to have somebody else do. So we've completely optimized that shape to ensure that the sealing performance is still there, the cooling performance, inductive performance is still there on the car. But it's completely seamless. And it was a testament that we did it right when we introduced that part to the line for the first time. And I kind of sat there quietly watching the operators install it. I saw the part come up. They put it in without issue and about three cars in, I asked them, so what'd you think of the new part? Like, what, I didn't notice anything very different about this. We were like, got it, good. So we're able to build the car the way that we need to. Really rewarding. From an engine perspective, I think one thing that's really unique about Z06 is that the engine's assembled right across the hallway from where we actually introduce it to the engine marriage station. So for a Stingray, for example, our team in Tonawanda, New York builds the LT2. It's brought to the plant and then it's introduced to the engine line. Whereas the LT6 is in pieces, nuts and bolts, again, across the hallway. So from my perspective in launching a Z06, I found a lot of advantage in that, that anything that we would see down the engine line or once it came down the chassis lines, we'd have the opportunity to go, again, right there and see if there's any opportunities for improvement. It really, it made my feedback loop a lot shorter because I knew who to talk to, how to find it, and had tangible parts on site. So you're not waiting to correspond across the company to get anything else changed or implemented. The LT6 components come in in various pieces and then we have one builder that takes it from cradle to grave. And seeing the equipment as an engineer is incredible. That's another thing that I don't think a lot of customers fully appreciate. If you're technically inclined at all to see the thought and intention behind all of the tools, the tolerances, the precision that goes into just putting the pieces together of the car, it's fascinating and you can really get lost in that. I think LT6 is so incredible because obviously it's hand-built. You have one person who put their pride into it. But from, again, my perspective, what's really cool to me is by the time I see the engine on the general assembly line, the heat shields on the exhaust manifolds are already discolored because we send the car to a 20-minute dyno test before it goes into the vehicle. And you can't talk about CA Corvette without bringing up the engines. And we've had extensive conversations with the chief engineer, the engineers of the LT6, specific at this point to the Z06 Corvette, your car. And there's a lot of information out there about how you should treat an engine, how you should break it in. But from spending some time at the plant, we also met the engine builders, the very specific process they go through to put them together. In an eight-hour shift, they're capable of putting together 2.75 engines in an eight-hour period. And these are high-precision. The LT6 is a very high-precision design. It shares most of its architecture with the LT6-R, which is in the race car. So a lot of that mentality from cooling to thermal control to oiling system, all of that is there. So there is all of that thought to attention to detail to make this a high-performance car, but there's also some special considerations you have to look at in terms of break-in. And can you walk me through some of that? So there are two separate break-in milestones for the C8 Z06. You have the 500-mile mark. When you hit 500 miles, the engine opens up the full RPM band. Prior to that, they want you to gently break in the engine, vary the RPM, and they limit your total RPM electronically to 6,500. Your next break-in milestone is at 1,500 miles, where by then, all of the sacrificial layers, all of the bearings in their eyes, are fully set for track load. High thermal load, high engine load for long periods of time. So when we talk about dynoing this car before it leaves the factory, each engine, before it goes in the car, has a 20-minute engine dyno cycle. And from talking to Dustin Gardner and Jordan Lee, that was more of a quality gate. And the way that they break in that engine for the 20 minutes, which is not a long period of time, it's to look for leaks, it's to look for quality defects, but it also runs the gamut of RPM range that it would experience on the street before it goes to a dealership. And what they're trying to avoid is an abusive customer that takes it from the dealership and does a donut right out of the lot and bangs it off the rev limiter. So part of this break-in accommodates it, but it's not a high-RPM, high-load engine dyno break-in. There's only one high-RPM run that would be from essentially third gear or second gear all the way up to almost redline, but not redline. And the reason that they're doing this, and the reason that there is this break-in process is they work with so many different bearing suppliers and different suppliers over the course of their history of designing these engines for 20-plus years. But in the case of the LT6, when you look at the bearing design, which comes from Teneco, their engineer said, look, we're gonna put a sacrificial layer, that base layer on the bearing, and that is designed to be malleable because we're dealing with a flat-plane crank engine, which there's a lot of vibration in. There's different forces. And to get an even wear on that bearing is not physically possible. There's always gonna be uneven wear. So the bearing manufacturer recommends you do not thermally shock the bearing. It's the worst thing you can do. Over the course of that 500 miles, you're going to create a smooth surface without potentially skimming a bearing. If you're operating this engine at high-load, high thermal shock to it, your likelihood of doing long-term damage, it's not just about the short-term, it's the long-term life of the engine, that's what they're concerned about the most. And that's what a lot of people seem to not understand. So once you get past those break-in points, they feel that it's safer. They also, as a preventative measure, in that first dyno cycle, they dump the oil out of the dyno cycle, put in fresh oil so you get rid of some of the contaminants from the curing silicone. They're talking about aeration in the oil. There's a lot of factors on the back-end that most normal people don't understand in terms of oil temperatures, cooling, and all the safety measures of trying to break in an engine like this. And the argument that we see online constantly is, well, race engines get break-in hard, you break it in hard like you would want to drive the car. And the reality is, in all their testing, in all their years, is the average speed of a normal car is about 35 miles an hour. That's where the engine lives most of its life. So it makes sense that you want to have a broad range of break-in, not just high RPM, high load. It needs to be at the low, middle, and high so that engine has a normal life cycle to it. Again, there's a lot of engineering that we're going to cover in future videos, but that's kind of the highlights. That's straight from the horse's mouth. And that's exactly right, Jack. You have these gentlemen that we talked to that have spent their entire life working on these, and this is the culmination of all that work. So I tend to believe that they're looking out for the best interests of their engine. Obviously, we've shared how excited we are to build this car here, but beyond the scope of just Chevy Corvette or building an American-made car, this facility is still a testament to American manufacturing, where, again, we've brought people from not only our plants from across the country and the globe, but we've also, I've interacted with a variety of different team members who have worked in manufacturing in countless different industries that ended up here, and they've adopted the passion, and they've seen that what we do here is very different, because the global landscape is changing. It's constantly evolving. Manufacturing is going to a lot of different places in the world for various reasons, so the fact that we've been able to maintain this footprint in this place and still attract people in large quantities to be a part of this American effort is also something that I think is very inspiring. In watching this video, hopefully you've come to appreciate that cars are made by people for people. They don't just show up on your doorstep like an Amazon package after you order one. I've had the unique privilege of meeting the engineers who designed the C8-06, the men and women at the Bowling Green Assembly Plant who put this car together. With this unique opportunity, hopefully it provided you a window into their world, so even if you're not a Corvette fan, you come away with a greater appreciation of the sheer complexity that goes into assembling a car. This vehicle is a culmination of thousands of people's efforts and abilities, and this, for many of them, is their dream job. My name is Curtis Coburn. I've been here at the facility seven years, but as a whole, 22 years, but General Motors. I got here in 2015. I'm the team leader here in chassis two. I have six jobs in my area. We put on the e-boost. We do the wheel-wheel connections. We do a battery tray. This is what we do over here. I repair all these things, and with me, I'm a fourth generation of automotive worker that works in this industry, so I love it, and it's part of me, and it's in the blood. I'm Morgan Beachford. I've been here seven years, and I work in Performance Build Center building engines. I build three different engines, Cadillac Escalade, Cadillac Blackwing, and the LT4 Camaro engine, and it takes eight hours to build 2.75 engines. It's my way of life. I mean, I'm here more usually than I am at home, but that's because I love it here so much. You know, working with everybody, everybody's really nice and great, and then the job just, it means a lot to me. I'm proud of what I do. That's what's great about Bowling Green. It's the only place in the whole world the Corvette's made. One of the things I've taken away from my corporate job, and I've carried over into business, was becoming very, very good at doing a lot with a little, and some of the jobs I've had, I've had minimal resources, budget, I've had no support from management, or the corporate side in terms of direction, and I've been able to get a lot done, and I've prided myself on being creative, and on the video side, Jack and I, as two people, we go out and we see some video teams of like 10, 20, 30 people on the corporate side, and we're like, why? How is this possible? I would love to have that amount of resources, but the reality is we're able to get a lot more done. Now, that doesn't mean that I don't have help, and I brought this up in many other videos. Because of my long-term relationship with Dell on the corporate side, when I supported servers, infrastructure, and users, where I literally spent my life trying to make other people's jobs easier, which meant if they didn't complain, I was doing something right. That was really my mantra, and it was about the tools I had implemented. So, a lot of my success was trial and error on the technical side, and now running my own business, I've taken a lot of those things I've learned in enterprise support and applied it to my own job. So, of course, a lot of that's troubleshooting. A lot of it is that technical aptitude to make these tools work for me, where typically I would have five people doing it. It has to be me. In the case of equipment, I'm using all these Dell Mobile Precision Workstations to travel, to bring it to the shop, to set up demos, to really work with footage, to now move into the HDR realm, where many corporate creators and people that work in this industry have shied away from it because it is more complicated. It takes more technical aptitude to get it working. I can push ahead by myself. I have the tools to do that. So, things like the Mobile Precision Workstation, I used to have a huge tower. I was bound to my desk. I can literally take a laptop with NVIDIA RTX processors or professional processors and Intel processors and get that work done, literally bringing it here to the shop, where I can edit, I can take care of this, I can go halfway across the country and still get content out because that's the only way that money is made. And to have that level of power in a small form factor with all the thermal management and the enterprise mentality behind it in terms of software and drivers, they understand people need uptime. That's what I'm looking for in an appliance. And while it may not be the flashiest thing in the world, the engineering behind it, the work behind it to make sure people like myself can continue working consistently at a very high load all the time is why I really appreciate these tools. And then also professional level displays, calibrated displays out of the box that all I have to do is minimal work to get that color profile set up for HDR, BT.2020 and all the other confusing specs, 2084, learning about nits and how different color profiles work for different delivery from web to SRGB to HDR on TVs. I mean, it's just unbelievable the amount of crap that you have to deal with. But when you have the tools and some of the support to make this work, projects like the Corvette video, future projects like NSX and some other car brands, we're able to get these things out. I appreciate all the time of the viewers, the Patreons, and of course the people on the corporate side like Corvette and GM that take this seriously, that believe in what we're trying to do and help to educate and teach people about the fact that things don't just magically appear in the air, that there's still people behind all the things that we love and are passionate about. Thanks for watching. We'll see you next video.