Book VI · Apocrypha Entry 33 of 55
Chevrolet Corvette Stingray
A cartilaginous fish with a venomous barb. Venomous — but not a snake, and not even close.
The most commonly misfiled car in this entire subject. It is venomous, which fools people. It is a fish, which settles it.
- Book
- Book VI — Apocrypha
- Marque
- Chevrolet
- Model
- Corvette Sting Ray / Stingray
- Years
- 1963–1976; 2014–
- Origin
- United States
- Namesake
- Stingray
- Binomial
- Dasyatis americana
- Verdict
- DENIED — venomous, but a fish
Sigil generated from the entry's own name. Every coil, hue and scale in this plate is a function of the string “chevrolet-corvette-stingray”, and of nothing else.
The Ophidiary receives more correspondence about the Sting Ray than about anything else, and the correspondence is always the same: surely it counts, it has venom.
It does have venom. A stingray’s tail carries one or more serrated barbs sheathed in venom-producing tissue, and the sting is a defensive strike delivered upward and backward, not a hunting behaviour. The wound is mechanical as well as chemical — the barb tears on the way out — and it is genuinely dangerous.
But we are separated from the stingray by roughly four hundred and fifty million years of vertebrate evolution. A snake and a stingray share a common ancestor that was a jawed fish in the Silurian. Compared with that gulf, the Wiesmann gecko is practically a sibling and the SSC Tuatara is an in-law.
The name arrived through Bill Mitchell at General Motors, whose Stingray racer of 1959 gave its shape and its word to the 1963 production car — the split-window coupé, the hidden headlamps, the pointed tail. Two words originally, Sting Ray. One word from 1968. Retired, then revived for the C7 in 2014.
It is one of the most beautiful cars America has ever built and it has no business in this bestiary. Denied.
Yes, it has venom. So does a platypus. The question was never about the poison. The question was about the spine.
Questions people actually ask
Is the Corvette Stingray named after a snake?
No. It is named after the stingray, a cartilaginous fish. Stingrays are venomous, which causes frequent confusion, but they are separated from snakes by roughly 450 million years of evolution.
Provenance of claims
This is a satire with a research habit. Every load-bearing statement above is listed here and labelled, so you can tell which sentences would survive a librarian.
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Documented
Stingrays carry venomous serrated barbs used defensively.
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Documented
The Corvette Sting Ray name derives from Bill Mitchell’s 1959 Stingray racer.