The 2020 Corvette Stingray features a removable hardtop roof that fits into the storage compartment behind the 6.2L LT2 V8 engine. The top is a single-piece unit that comes off rather easily and even leaves some room for more storage underneath it when it is stowed away – a rather elegant solution compared to some other removable hardtop supercars.
Take the Lamborghini Aventador Roadster, for example. The $450,000+ supercar features a two-piece removable hardtop roof that stows away in the tiny front cargo area, taking up the majority of the space in the cargo cavity and leaving little room for passengers to store a shopping bag or an overnight travel bag.
2020 Corvette owner Morgan Crosbie, who runs the Cars and Crosbie YouTube channel, recently put together a video explaining the process of removing the Corvette C8’s roof and stowing it away in the rear cargo area. Crosbie had never removed the roof of his 2020 Corvette before making the video, as he lives in London, Ontario and it’s still quite cold in most of Canada, so this video shows his first attempt at removing the roof from his own car. That said, he has removed the roof of a different Corvette C8 in the past, so he is familiar with the process.
This video is helpful for current or soon-to-be 2020 Corvette owners who want to take the top off of their cars this summer. The process is the same whether the vehicle features the standard fiberglass roof, transparent roof or visible carbon-fiber roof, we should point out.
As a reminder, the Corvette C8 will also be offered as a hardtop convertible, but Chevrolet has not built any 2020 Corvette Convertible customer cars as of this writing due to production delays brought on by the UAW strike and the COVID-19 pandemic. The Corvette Convertible does not require any manual labor to remove the roof – just hit a button and the roof will collapse into the rear of the vehicle in about 16 seconds.
Check out the video embedded below for a full rundown on how to remove the 2020 Corvette C8 hardtop roof.
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Comment
I trust the C8 engineers designed a much more rugged latching system than was on earlier Corvettes I owned ’77, ’78 and ’79 Vettes with the removable T-tops.
That era of Vettes had a pair of simple pull-latches that could be dislodged from the “locked” position by a strong blow with a fist to the roof panel. I know, because I had two pair of the optional tinted glass panels stolen off my ’78 Vette, TWICE within a year.
After the second loss. I had to resort to buying a set of questionable quality aftermarket removable locks that prevented the latches from moving, if the roof panel was struck. The locks were a pain to use, but what else could I do? The 1984 and later models dropped the T-Bar center brace, and went to a one-piece, larger, removable panel, that held down the panel with fixed bolts in the windshield header and small rear roof section. The car came with about a 9″ “L” shaped wrench, with TORX-like ends that allowed the driver to loosen the bolts, and remove the panel.
From videos I’ve seen on the new C8, the engineers have retuned to the pull latches, which I hope work well. But a determined thief could just smash the side windows, unlatch the roof panel, and be gone within a minute, or so, especially if it is the more desirable, optional transparent top.
If people will steal Amazon delivered packages of front porches, this probably wouldn’t be much harder work. At least, the roof panel on the new convertible model is semi-permanently fixed to the retraction framework