Chevrolet sees fourth lawsuit over overheating Corvettes

Corvette Z06 owners finding car can't keep cool on-track, often enter 'limp mode'

Chevrolet has just been handed a fourth class-action lawsuit related to its Corvette Z06 sports car overheating on race tracks and entering a slowed-down engine-protecting limp mode.

The 650-horsepower supercharged high-performance machine was supposed to have been updated for the 2017 model year to fix what owners claim is a cooling system defect, but the latest lawsuit, filed February 20 in a Michigan district court, includes even those newer cars, reports car blog CarScoops.

Owners report having their car entering the low-speed limp mode after as little as 15 minutes spent on track, despite the fact that for the 2017 car, GM engineers went with a new hood with larger vents and a revised supercharger cover, says the lawsuit.

“Instead of building a car that could live up to the hype it created, GM chose to pour its resources into an onslaught of deceptive marketing, touting to would-be buyers that the Corvette Z06 had ‘track-proven structure and technologies,” Steve Berman, managing partner of law firm Hagens Berman, told the blog. “What Z06 owners received from GM – a car that peters out after 15 minutes of track driving – is anything but ready for the track.”

The lawsuit claims up to 30,000 Corvette Z06s from model years 2015, 2016 and 2017 could be affected, and that GM’s alleged failure to find a repair for the limp-mode issue constitutes the automaker violating its own warranty agreement.

The first overheating-limp-mode class-action lawsuit launched on behalf of Corvette Z06 owners was filed in July 2017.