It’s a strange situation, concedes Tony Roma. “Corvette is obviously a world-famous name, given its automotive heritage, and yet it’s not well-known in the sense that it’s a rare thing to see one on the road here [in the UK],” says Roma, the brand’s head of engineering. “But we think it’s very much an untapped market for us.”

Indeed, Roma might invite those with upwards of £153,400 to spend on an order now – and the patience to wait until September for delivery – to look to the Chevrolet Corvette E-Ray, unveiled at this year’s Goodwood Festival of Speed and arguably the car at the heart of the General Motors-owned company’s big push into Europe.

Here is the first all-wheel-drive car from Corvette – the world’s longest-running, continuously-produced passenger car marque. It’s the first available with right-hand drive. And if Corvette alone is a pop culture staple – check out songs by the Beach Boys, Prince and, naturally, the Corvettes – the E-Ray is also the first with a name that harks back to the Corvette Stingray, launched in 1963 and, through its technology and styling, considered by many to be the definitive American sports car. The E-Ray is also – and here’s the hitch – a hybrid version of the Corvette C8. It’s Chevrolet Corvette’s first (partly) electric car.

But hang on, this is not the kind of hybrid more commonly associated with, say, the Toyota Prius, as ground-breaking as that car was, especially for cab drivers. This is the kind of hybrid that’s part 6.2-litre V8 engine, part regenerative 1.9kW battery, combining to give the E-Ray 643 horsepower and the capability of 0-62mph in a terrifying 2.9 seconds – making it the fastest Corvette to date. No wonder performance car makers like Ferrari, Lamborghini and McLaren have also revisited hybrid over the last year.

“What’s tough about a job like mine is having to look so far into the future,” says Roma. “There’s that idea that if, back at the turn of the 20th century, you’d have asked people what they wanted, they would have told you a faster horse. That’s the thing about hybrid. When customers are shown how hybrid can be used intelligently, they have another reaction. They understand what an effective all-rounder it is. It’s like they’ve discovered this fantastic new technology [even though hybrid systems actually date back to 1900]. And we’re like, ‘yeah, we told you it could be good!’”

It’s an understanding that Corvette had to reach too: one challenge of electric vehicles, all-electric or hybrid, is that the weight of the battery can mitigate against performance, and the mere placement of that battery can negatively affect handling. “For us, the decision to go with a hybrid system was an easy one in that we could see the benefits were good enough for it to earn its way into the car,” says Roma. “We wouldn’t have gone with hybrid for the sake of it.”

But it’s not just the economy, the lower emissions or the lower maintenance that were the deciding factors. There’s also what Corvette is calling ‘stealth mode’. Roma notes that he lives in an area populated by Corvette employees and that, whenever there’s a distant roar of a Corvette’s internal combustion engine, his wife jokes that his children are calling to him. “I don’t find that sound annoying but my neighbours might,” he laughs. The E-Ray allows for silent, all-electric wafting around urban areas and serious ICE thrills out of town.

“It’s a tightrope we walk all the time. The car has to be race-track proven – because that’s a large part of what customers are buying into,” says Roma. Indeed, this July saw Corvette scoop its first victory at the European Le Mans Series’ Four Hours of Imola race. “But it also needs to be comfortable when you’re just driving it to work. It has to be credible [as a performance car] but work for the everyday.”

It’s why, for example, there’s a fine balance in the new E-Ray between its digital side – as Roma notes, too many performance cars allow on-board computing to make many of the more precision driving decisions for the driver, making the experience “video gamey” – and the analogue side that keeps said driver engaged. The E-Ray’s Performance Traction Management can be tweaked according to just how engaged the driver wants to be. Seeing as the car tops out at 183mph, being engaged is a good idea.

Roma says that while the E-Ray is likely a stepping stone to the first all-electric Corvette – the company is in no hurry to go down that road, and, crucially, its customers aren’t yet calling for it either – the car isn’t the only indication of Corvette’s arrival in Europe. Next year it launches another perhaps even more disruptive hybrid-powered car, the ZRX1, which seeks to reinvent the idea of the 1,000hp-plus supercar.

As Roma points out, most cars in this rarefied category are priced above $1m. Thanks to an improved electric motor and the economies of scale on non-performance parts made possible by General Motors’ size (it’s the world’s fourth biggest car manufacturer by production numbers), all 1,250 incredible horsepower of the ZRX1 – and its promise of 0-60 in under two seconds – is set to retail closer to $200,000.

Roma concedes that this doesn’t, of course, exactly make it an economy car. “But it is,” he reckons, “going to be a supercar for the masses.”

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