C8 Mid Engine

Admit it, most people are impressed with the latest gizmos.

While she was taking a couple of our son’s friends home the other day in our new Blazer, my wife says they were in awe of the fancy technology Chevy packed into the SUV, space-age features like the way they could see all around the vehicle through the bird’s eye camera system, not to mention the wide-angle view behind the vehicle that popped up on the rearview mirror.

But sometimes, you have to wonder, are we getting a little too complicated with our vehicles? How much will it cost to fix these fancy systems when they quit working – after the warranty expires?

Case in point is a post on Reddit Tuesday from a C8 owner complaining that the glovebox in his brand new Stingray won’t open. “Silly engineers put the relay for the glovebox — behind the glovebox!” he reports.

This is the first case we’ve heard about a glovebox not opening in a C8, so we’re not sure if this is a widespread problem. Hopefully, it’s an isolated incident, but still….

Whatever happened to the good old days when you just pushed a manual button and the glovebox opened up without any kind of electronics involved at all? Some people lament the days when you just turned a crank to raise and lower your windows.

But were the good ol’ days really all that good? Those old systems weren’t fool-proof, either. How many times have you seen a glovebox latch get loose and fall out in an old car? But even if they do fail like that, you can still access the stuff inside the glovebox. Won’t be that easy with a C8, huh?

Those manual windows years ago weren’t perfect, either. I’ve had windows in classic cars that wouldn’t go up and down because something came loose inside the door and the handle just spun and spun around. Very annoying!

The moral of the story, I guess, is that any system made by man is eventually going to fail. Of course, in the case of the $60,000 C8, you hope that won’t be in the first few days of ownership.