When Elon Musk burst onto the scene in his little Tesla Roadster, it seemed a matter of time before electricity rendered gas-powered sports cars obsolete. 

It hasn’t worked out that way. Automakers have struggled to bring purely electric two-seaters to market. The ones that managed to emerge have been flatly rejected by consumers. Porsche has walked back plans for an all-electric lineup of Boxster and Cayman models, seemingly spooked by technical hurdles and tepid response from its fanatical customers. Lamborghini last week scrapped plans for its first all-electric model, with the CEO saying the brand’s customers have almost “zero interest” in a car without a gas engine. 

And yet, the Corvette ZR1X hybrid — surreal, spectacular, and a screaming bargain versus rivals — demonstrates how electrification is revolutionizing the highest ranks of performance, just not in the way people expected. That includes Formula 1 racing, where 50 percent of power this season comes from hybrid electricity. Among supercars and hypercars especially, if you don’t have a hybrid boost, you can no longer compete.

My test of the ZR1X, at Sonoma Raceway and on roads in Napa Valley, underscores the inevitability of that electric helping hand. Read these numbers, and feel free to weep: 1,250 hybrid horsepower, up from 1,064 in the gasoline-only ZR1. A 0–60mph moonshot in 1.67 seconds, nose-to-nose with a $2.5 million Rimac Nevera R EV, and quicker than any Tesla or Lucid. 

A storming lap of Germany’s benchmark Nürburgring circuit took 6 minutes, 49 seconds and change. That set a new American production-car record, beat the Rimac by 16 seconds, and just nipped Porsche’s track-specialist 911 GT3 RS. It also handily beat the Yangwang U9 extreme, the 3,000-horsepower, roughly $235,000 Chinese EV that’s more a prototype than a legitimate “production car,” since no more than 30 will ever be built. That Yangwang clocked an impressive 6 minute, 59-second lap, the first EV in history to run below seven minutes at the ’ring. 

Yet here’s where the Corvette’s 73 years of racing, cultural, and engineering history comes in, including nine production-class wins at the 24 Hours of Le Mans since 2020: The ZR1X, with less than half the horsepower of the Yangwang, whipped the world’s fastest EV by 10 full seconds, an eternity by track standards. And the Corvette’s own speedy engineers — including chassis engineer Drew Cattell, who I find myself chasing around Sonoma Raceway — have been the ones barnstorming the ZR1X to track records across North America and Europe, versus the usual pro-racing ringers hired by other automakers.

While top speeds are more about bragging rights than real-world scenarios, the Corvette’s 233mph peak also tops any number of hybrid hypercars, whether the forthcoming $3.7 million, 1,184hp Ferrari F80 or a $2.1 million, 1,258hp McLaren W1. Even the Lamborghini Temerario hybrid I recently drove in Italy, with its vivid 10,000rpm V8, topped $500,000 with options. And where many Faberge-rare models require both wealth and insider connections to acquire, this one comes straight from your neighborhood Chevy dealer, for $207,395 to start or $10,000 more for a ZR1X convertible.

Sure, a lot of money for a Corvette, but a sweet deal compared to the usual billionaire’s brigade. For barely half that price, a Corvette E-Ray hybrid starts from $110,195, with an ample 655 horsepower. A standard Corvette C8 coupe with 495 horsepower starts from $71,995. But some people will always want the top-shelf model in performance or exclusivity.

On the devilish road course at Sonoma Raceway, the ZR1X’s power and g-forces threatened to rearrange my molecular structure. If the performance seemed a bit unreal, I have proof: a memory card from the Corvette’s ingenious Performance Data Recorder filled with video, lap times, and other telemetry data that I can analyze to improve my times.

The ZR1X adopts the 5.5-liter engine from the non-hybrid ZR1, mated to an eight-speed, dual-clutch automated gearbox with shapely carbon-fiber paddle shifters. This “Gemini” V8 is peak ICE, with its Ferrari-esque flat crankshaft, titanium connecting rods, 1,064 horsepower, and a howling 8,000-rpm redline. The hand-built, twin-turbocharged engine sits behind my helmeted noggin and spine-protecting HANS device. That racing V8 is displayed below a vented, transparent panel that pays homage to the fabled split-window Sting Ray of 1963.

Up front, a beefed-up electric motor provides supplementary squirts of up to 186 horsepower and 145 pound-feet of torque, a gain of 26 horses and 20 pound-feet from the E-Ray. As in the E-Ray, there’s no physical connection between gasoline and electric power sources. Instead, software and sensors monitor vehicle parameters and driver inputs. They conduct and coordinate power and traction between fossil-fueled rear wheels and the independent front axle, in tandem with the Corvette’s brilliant electronic limited-slip differential. 

The other party trick is torque-vectoring controls that help the Corvette dig out of Sonoma’s corners with near-indescribable pace and control that no rear-wheel-drive car— including the standard ZR1 — could match. I’m not constantly trying to square off corners as with the ZR1 I drove at Circuit of the Americas in Austin, hurrying to unwind the steering wheel so I could lay down that monstrous power. It’s the ZR1X that ends up feeling more balanced and fluid in corners.  

Even the Corvette’s hot-shoe engineers have been debating which car is “best”: the rear-drive ZR1 or AWD hybrid ZR1X? But they remind us that driver confidence is a critical part of the speed equation. If you’re spooked, you’re not going fast. 

“There’s a tameness to the ZR1X, but in a good way,” says Aaron Link, Chevy’s global performance manager. “You can go just as fast without being on the ragged edge and white-knuckling it everywhere.”  

The motor can provide nitrous-like shots of electricity at speeds up to 160mph, versus 150mph in the E-Ray. The heightened cutoff speed burnishes drag-racing bona fides, since the ZR1X can dash to nearly 160mph in the space of a quarter mile. Automated launch control allows drivers to adjust both engine speed and the amount of wheel slip to maximize thrust.

On a prepped, sticky dragstrip surface adjacent to Sonoma’s road course, I engage the Corvette’s burnout mode, emitting clouds of rubber as I approach the start line to clean schmutz from fat Michelin tires. I manage a quarter mile in 9.1 seconds. Not bad. But in Michigan, Corvette engineers clocked a quarter mile in a ludicrous 8.65 seconds at 159.5mph.

A lithium-ion battery pack provides the juice, mounted low and centrally along the car’s rigid aluminum spine. At the track, a fascinating full-size cutaway model reveals the battery packaged within the center console, and other technical goodies. The petite pack has a capacity of 1.9 kilowatts, with useable energy of about 1.6 kilowatt-hours, up 25 percent versus the E-Ray. Eighteen radiators keep track temperatures in check. 

Like a standard Toyota Prius, there’s no plug required. But the goal here is exhilaration, not efficiency or electric-only driving. The battery and motor are designed for one job: to slurp up massive quantities of regenerative braking juice, then spit it back out in 188-horsepower jolts. 

Kinetic-energy returns are even more generous on racetracks, where brakes get a bootcamp-level workout. Beyond that electric assist, gargantuan physical brakes — the largest ever fitted to a GM car, with bespoke 10-piston calipers and carbon-ceramic rotors — haul the ZR1X down from epic speeds. The Corvette can achieve 1.9 g’s of neck-twisting deceleration from 180 to 120mph.

Even with its 495-horsepower V8, a standard Corvette can approach 30mpg on a mellow highway cruise. The ZR1X, on a drive through the green-velvet hills of Napa Valley, shows me 11mpg in spirited driving, with a 15.5mpg average over the car’s last 1,800 miles. But who’s counting? On track, you’re looking at closer to 4mpg, with the Corvette able to consume two gallons of fuel per minute under full throttle. (The ZR1X could really use a bigger fuel tank). 

On public roads, you can’t knock the rapid-response battery below roughly 50 percent of charge, no matter how aggressively you drive. Press a “Charge +” button on the steering wheel — part of a smartly upgraded interior found on all 2026 Corvettes — and the ZR1X quickly replenishes its battery over just a few miles of normal cruising. 

A range of specialized energy strategies squeezes the most out of the hybrid tech. An Endurance mode monitors and adjusts energy storage to ensure those electrified front wheels can deliver consistent power and AWD handling over a full tank of fuel; you wouldn’t want to run out of either during a track lap, or in the middle of a tricky corner. A Qualifying mode elicits a full-bore, tag-team assault of fossil and electric fuel for the fastest possible time over a single lap. 

That handsome interior now features three high-resolution screens, including a new display wedged to the left of the hex-shaped, carbon-fiber-rimmed steering wheel. The previous “waterfall” of switches between driver and passenger, the C8 Corvette’s most try-hard feature, is replaced by a carbon-fiber grab handle that terrified shotgun passengers will appreciate. The left-hand touchscreen offers intuitive access to launch control, performance readouts, and the sophisticated Performance Traction Management (PTM) system. That’s essentially a gamified setup that adjusts stability and safety oversight based on a driver’s relative level of skill and daring. The system toggles through Wet, Dry, Sport, Race 1, Race 2, and a new PTM Pro mode that promises the purest, most unmediated experience. PTM Pro disables all stability and traction controls, but maintains brake-based energy recovery, electric torque-vectoring, and automatic applications of inside front brakes to maximize corner-exit traction. 

Aerodynamics and cooling play a huge role in speed and stamina, from those 18 heat exchangers to scoops, vents, and skyscraping rear wing. That wing, part of an optional ZTK Performance Package, can generate 1,200 pounds of downforce at top speed to keep the ’vette planted to the pavement. 

And while I’ve never been a fan of red Corvettes, I’d make an exception for the red mist paint, a knockout shade that’s more Sonoma pinot noir, less fire-engine red.  

Even beyond the fantasy-car set, drivers of more attainable sports cars have shown precious little interest in EVs. Ask a typical Mazda Miata driver if he would trade that underpowered yet joyful roadster for a “faster” Tesla. Prepare for an earful. EV acolytes tend to wave away or even gaslight the issues, but sports car enthusiasts know they’re real: Hefty EV batteries and overstuffed curb weights hamper agility. Small, low-slung sports cars don’t have great places to fit batteries, forcing a tradeoff between reasonable range and agility. Then there’s the absence of analog sound and/or physical sensations, which has led EV makers to simulate engine sounds and now even “fake” gear changes. 

EV batteries and systems that quickly run out of juice during spirited driving — or overheat and give up entirely after a handful of laps — are another engineering challenge. Those challenges will be steadily overcome, but we’re not fully there yet. Instead, performance hybrids, from these Corvettes to the latest Porsche 911, Lamborghini Temerario, and Ferrari 296 GTB, are beginning to win over even electric skeptics. These models can romp all day on racetracks or in lonely canyons, replenish fuel tanks in two to three minutes, and keep on going. 

For the ZR1X, the final electric edge is an F1-style push-to-pass button that combines every joule and kilowatt into a screaming ball of power. That electric joy buzzer will come in handy if certain competitors pull up at a stoplight or an adjacent lane. When those snootier supercars finally catch up, ZR1 owners can deliver a coup de grace: Just tell them what you paid. 

Photography by Chevrolet

Driving a 2026 Ioniq 9 SUV around the Hyundai Motor Group Metaplant in Georgia can feel like a victory lap for the South Korean automaker. Hyundai’s electric flagship carves out room for three America-centric rows of seats, from a booming brand whose EVs and hybrids already make up one in every four US sales. 

Even better, the Ioniq 9 and smaller Ioniq 5 are emerging from a futuristic new factory in America, giving Hyundai a defensible bulwark against the tariffs and onshoring fervor of Donald Trump’s administration. As I watch these electric SUVs roll off a surgically clean assembly line, Hyundai’s opportunistic timing looms as large as the hulking robots that help build its cars.

A tour of the $7.6 billion factory also underlines how many automakers are plowing ahead with long-laid EV plans, regardless of Category 5 Washington winds that threaten to blow away Joe Biden-era support for EV manufacturing, consumer tax credits, and public charging. 

Seen from the air en route to Savannah, the Metaplant resembles a printed circuit board on a green background, blown up to epic scale. Eleven low-slung, pale-green buildings dot 3,000 acres of Georgia countryside, with a total 7.5 million square feet of space. One building houses a $4 billion battery plant, a joint operation with South Korea’s LG Energy Solution, that plans to begin supplying cells for Ioniq models next year. The company is racing to open a second battery plant in Georgia, a roughly $5 billion joint operation with SK On. A forthcoming steel plant in Louisiana further underscores Hyundai’s commitment to its largest global market. It’s all part of a $21 billion investment in America between now and 2028, the vast majority pledged during the EV-friendly Biden administration.

No humans required

Pulling into the factory, I watch a conveyor carry freshly painted cars across a windowed bridge. It’s designed to let drivers on Interstate 16 see the fruits of a plant that will ultimately produce 500,000 EVs and hybrids a year — more than Tesla’s Texas Gigafactory, with its 375,000-car capacity. Georgians may also see their tax dollars at work. The publicly supported plant already employs 1,340 “Metapros,” enough to boost the automaker’s annual local payroll to $497 million. Hyundai foresees an eventual 8,500 jobs on-site, and another 7,000 satellite jobs for local suppliers and businesses. 

That’s a lot of jobs. Compared with the Detroit-area factory where I toiled in the 1980s, a depressing maelstrom of heat, dirt, toxic chemicals, and industrial accidents, this joint is like MOMA: a modern museum of manufacturing art.

But the factory also highlights a catch-22 of modern manufacturing, one that Trump’s economic advisors seem to overlook, intentionally or otherwise: To have any chance of competing with China’s EV-and-battery juggernaut, factories must enlist growing armies of AI-enhanced robots that can potentially work 24/7 and never demand overtime or benefits. That means employing relatively fewer humans. 

At the factory loading docks, Autonomous Guided Vehicles, or AGVs, busily unload parts from semitrucks. Roughly 300 of these robotic sleds roam the factory with no tracks required, neatly avoiding workers or obstacles. AI informs the entire factory operation, from procurement to logistics to production. 

These AGVs are common in today’s factories, but I’ve never seen them at this scale, or a certain tag-team maneuver: A pair of sleds slide below finished Hyundais as they roll off the line. They squeeze the cars’ wheels in robotic arms, hoist them off the ground, and ferry cars where they need to go. I’ve visited car factories around the world, and this is the first I’ve seen where an employee doesn’t have to start cars and drive them away.

Automated vehicles also carry every component to the assembly line for efficient “just-in-time” installation, no humans required. That avoids wasting money and labor stockpiling huge backlogs of parts. 

“They’re delivering the right parts to the right station at the right time, so you’re no longer relying on people to make decisions” or losing time to mistakes, says Jerry Roach, senior manager of general assembly. 

Man’s best friend does make an appearance. A pair of robotic dogs named “Spot,” bred by the Hyundai-owned, Massachusetts-based Boston Dynamics, scan and sniff out potential defects on car welds. Those yellow-coated dogs may soon be joined by humanoid robots, the AI-driven “Atlas” models that Hyundai plans to deploy throughout its factories in the future. The dexterous biped bots — whose ability to cartwheel, breakdance, and barrel roll already outdoes most auto workers — appear outwardly friendly, but will strike any sentient human as a potential Terminator of jobs. (Hyundai executives insist that is not the case).

The welding shop alone houses 475 industrial robots, piecing together the building blocks of a car chassis. A steel stamping plant is so spookily quiet that no ear protection is required, even as robots stamp out roofs, fenders, and other body panels in a whirling, complicated dance. As with many leading-edge factories, there are strikingly few workers beyond the assembly line itself; I spot only a few dozen at work in the cavernous welding hall. 

Familiar industrial robots — but not yet humanoid Atlas robots — even install bulky car doors on the assembly line. Roach says that job is notoriously tough for workers to manage without potentially damaging painted surfaces. Such “collaborative” robots must be safe and reliable enough to operate alongside humans without physical separation required.  

“This is a real-life factory of the future,” Roach says. 

Clean energy targets

Those kinds of jobs, involving massively heavy lifting, repetitive tasks, or computerized speed and accuracy, are “prime things” to automate, Roach says. Other jobs require the tactile precision that only human hands and vision provide.

“I want my people doing craftsmanship,” Roach says. “I want to pay people well for the things they do well, and take away all the stuff that’s tedious and boring, the jobs people don’t want to do.” 

Of course, some people might not mind tedious or heavy-lifting jobs that also pay a generous living wage. But there’s no going back to the days when it took many thousands of workers to keep a factory humming; Ford’s River Rouge complex, designed by Albert Kahn, employed more than 100,000 workers during World War II.

Twenty-first-century carmaking also means the latest in green tech. The Metaplant targets obtaining 100 percent of its energy from renewable sources. Trucks that haul parts here daily from a localized supply chain are powered by hydrogen fuel cells and produce zero tailpipe emissions. The 21-truck fleet is built by the Hyundai-owned XCIENT, the world’s first commercialized fuel-cell semis.

Employees can park in nearly 1,900 spaces beneath solar roofs, shielded from baking Georgia sun, which provides up to five percent of the plant’s electricity. The bulk of the factory’s finished cars are shipped by rail rather than truck, trimming the plant’s carbon footprint.

Credit where credit’s due

Hyundai hopes those trains will work overtime shipping the 2026 Ioniq 9. Buyers will find a spacious, more affordable foil to a Rivian R1S or Tesla Model X, with 50 percent more cargo space behind its third row than Tesla. The sister car to the critically acclaimed Kia EV9 is the most expensive Hyundai yet, starting from $60,595 for a single-motor model with a modest 215 horsepower. The cocooning, thoroughly pleasant-driving SUV gets a 110 kilowatt-hour battery that supplies a generous 335 miles of driving range, or a still-solid 311 to 320 miles for AWD versions. It’s stuffed with useful tech, including a curling pair of conjoined 12.3-inch screens, 100-watt USB-C connectors, and active noise cancellation. 

Ioniq 9 prospects may focus on a particularly compelling piece of tech: an onboard Tesla NACS connector opens the wide world of Tesla Supercharging to buyers. (The smaller Ioniq 5, which kicked off Georgia production in October, was the first non-Tesla with a native NACS plug). Like other EVs with advanced architectures of 800 or more volts, the Ioniq 9 doesn’t charge at its peak rates on Superchargers. But Hyundai still cites a 10-to-80-percent refill in 40 minutes. That drops to 24 minutes on the most powerful 350-kilowatt CCS chargers from Electrify America. Ioniq 9s will come with free adapters to plug into CCS stations, opening access to a total 45,000 DC stalls in America. 

Hyundai was also hoping to lure Ioniq buyers with a $7,500 consumer tax credit, including by switching Ioniq 5 production from South Korea to Georgia. For the Ioniq 9 I tested — a top-shelf, $75,000 Calligraphy AWD model with 422 horsepower from a pair of electric motors — that credit would represent 10 percent of the price. But now the Trump administration is turning on electrified cars, the majority built in Republican-led states, in unprecedented, nearly malicious fashion. It is kneecapping those credits, blocking public money for chargers, and saddling EVs and hybrids with annual fees for road maintenance.  

Hyundai had also taken its lumps under the Biden administration: The IRA made its imported EVs ineligible for tax credits, despite Hyundai’s pledge of billions of dollars in US investment. José Muñoz, Hyundai’s global president, made it clear the company felt blindsided and unfairly sidelined from credits.  

The Metaplant was one answer, allowing Hyundai to shift Ioniq 5 production from South Korea. That boosts the model’s percentage of US- and Canadian-made parts from a piddling two percent to 63 percent, including US-sourced batteries. For the Ioniq 9, the North American share sits at 60 percent. Finally, Hyundai could tout both American-made Ioniq models as being fully eligible for $7,500 consumer tax credits, as executives did during my plant tour. 

But in a bitter irony, a Hyundai that crossed oceans and moved mountains to jump-start US production of Hyundai, Kia, and luxury Genesis EVs is about to be shut out of credits. Again. 

There are lessons in there, somewhere. For tariff proponents, the Metaplant might be a $7.6 billion lesson in reality: No American factory can screw together a single car without some share of imported parts, including from a China that holds a near-monopoly on several raw or processed battery materials.

For automakers, including (surely envious) Hyundai rivals now under pressure to onshore their own factories, the lessons are different. They must deal with the Trump administration’s ever-changing tariff moods, in a business that lives for long-term clarity, regulatory consistency, and economic stability.

For every EV maker, including a Hyundai Motor that seemingly did everything by the book, a conclusion appears inescapable: They are on their own. Expect no help from Washington, but rather potential hurt. The only possible strategy is to roll up their sleeves, keep their heads down, and avoid further kicks to the teeth.