New Chevrolet Corvette ups interior game for 2026 but keeps all the V8 drama

The wraps came off the current, eight-generation Chevrolet Corvette back in 2020, so a mid-life facelift is long overdue for this iconic American sports car. And while the Corvette’s update for 2026 is limited to the interior, it’s still pretty significant. 

From the base-level Stingray to the ballistic ZR1 variant, the entire Corvette line-up will get a completely overhauled interior. Gone is the vertical spine of buttons between the seats that controlled things like the climate functions, with some of those controls now situated on a revised dual-screen layout. 

Chevrolet has also clearly listened to our criticisms that the infotainment set-up in the existing Corvette felt a little hard to use, thanks to some pretty basic graphics and a small interface. For 2026, the company has replaced the eight-inch touchscreen with a 12.7-inch central screen, and the 12-inch driver’s display with a 14-inch ‘diagonal driver information center’. There’s also a brand-new 6.6-inch touchscreen for the driver that displays additional vehicle information such G-force, tyre pressures, mileage or readouts from the Corvette’s traction management system.

On the centre console, the cup-holders have lost their folding lid, but there’s now an additional storage area for wireless smartphone charging, with the gear selector located in the same place and the drive mode selector repositioned in line with it. The volume knob has even been enlarged to make it easier to use and the ventilation controls can now be found under the central touchscreen on a row of physical buttons. 

Explaining the change in layout, Dusty Smith, performance driving product manager, said: “There’s an intentional balance of physical and virtual controls. For example, the head-up display controls are now virtualised, which opens space for Performance Traction Management controls to be intuitive physical buttons.” 

Other interior tweaks for the 2026 Corvette include ‘ultimate suede’, which adds more microfibre suede to the cabin, while an electrochromatic glass roof allows for three levels of opacity. There’s also two new exterior colours to choose from: Roswell Green Metallic and Blade Silver Metallic.

The line-up remains the same, with the 492bhp 6.2-litre V8 Stingray, the 661bhp 5.5-litre V8 Z06, the 646bhp hybridised V8 E-Ray and the flagship ZR1, which gets the same flat-plane-crank V8 as the Z06, but with twin-turbocharging for 1,049bhp. 

The Corvette has been available in the UK through a handful of official distributors for a few years and while we expect the new model to go on sale in the US in early 2026, there’s been no confirmation that it will come here. Pricing for any market hasn’t been announced either, but you can expect the entry-level Stingray to sit at around the £100,000 mark.

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