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Chevy Corvette Stingray picks up another award, this time from Automobile

The new Chevrolet Corvette Stingray has picked up another buff book accolade after capturing Road and Track's Performance Car of the Year award. The seventh-generation of America's sports car (sorry Viper, Mustang, et al.) has been named Automobile Magazine's Automobile of the Year.
Automobile's award to the Corvette over competitors is the mirror image of its rival Motor Trend, which named the Cadillac CTS its car of the year over the C7. The CTS was, according to the Automobile team, the closest contender to the mighty Stingray. Great news all around for General Motors it seems.
As for what pushed the Corvette past its distant, four-door cousin, Automobile commended its excellent, 6.2-liter V8 calling the car's performance "simply awesome" while also remarking that it is easier to drive fast than ever before thanks to steering and chassis tweaks. Following a theme set by other publications, there were also plaudits for the interior, of all things, with the buff book complimenting the car's ergonomics and material quality, while also praising the standard seats.

Personal testimonies show real-world effect of plugging in with Chevy Volt

At this point, there are tens of thousands of individual stories about what it's like to live with a Chevrolet Volt. But it also remains informative to take a look at one of these in depth. For example, one Atlanta-area Volt owner says he's cut his cents-per-mile ownership costs by almost 40 percent compared to his previous car primarily because of his ability to drive almost all the time on electric power. Jeffrey Cohen told Clean Technica that he put about 14,000 miles on his Volt extended-range plug-in hybrid for the year that ended October 2013, and that more than 92 percent of those were on electrons. He estimates his "lifetime" miles per gallon rating at a whopping 384 mpg, a figure pushed upward by the fact that he installed a Level 2 charger at home while his employer added an external 110-volt charger at work. Cohen is spending 45 cents a mile for his car, compared to 73 cents in his Infiniti M35. As a result, he's spending 45 cents a mile for his car, compared to 73 cents a mile with his prior vehicle, an Infiniti M35. About two-thirds of those Volt costs are for the $349-a-month lease payments, while 15 percent is insurance, 11 percent is for the charger and seven percent for the gas and electricity that actually powers the car. Helping lower that last figure is an overnight electricity rate that's about 10 percent of Cohen's daytime rate. Chevy parent General Motors hopes such testimonies will re-trigger sales for the Volt in 2014. Last year, GM sold 23,094 Volts, down 1.6 percent from 2012. We expect our readers have similar stories they'd like to share in the Comments. Related Gallery 2011 Chevrolet Volt: Review View 22 Photos News Source: Clean TechnicaImage Credit: Lead image: AP Photo/Jae C. Hong Green Chevrolet GM Electric running costs

Vert-A-Pac train cars kept your Chevy Vega's price in check

Our apologies to those who've seen this before, but for the rest of the class, how awesome are these pictures of the Vert-A-Pac shipping system General Motors came up with to ship the Chevrolet Vega back in the 1970s? Developed along with Southern Pacific Railroad, GM was able to double the amount of Vega models it could ship by packing them into the unique storage cars vertically.
At the time, rail cars could fit 15 vehicles each, but Chevrolet was able to lower shipping costs by making it possible to ship 30 Vegas per rail car, in turn allowing the price of the Vega to remain as low as possible. Each rail car had 30 doors that would fold down so that a Vega could be strapped on, and then a forklift would come along and lift the door into place. All the cars were positioned nose down, and since they were shipped with all of their required fluids, certain aspects had to be designed specifically for this type of shipping, including an oil baffle in the engine, a special battery and even a repositioned windshield washer reservoir. See for yourself in our image gallery above.