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Article: The first American car to break 100 horsepower per liter
June 9, 2026
Story by Matthew Bell in HotCarsFor most of the 20th century, American performance engineering operated on a simple principle: more cubic inches, more power. Displacement was the currency. The muscle car era ran on 7.0-liter V8s. Even by the 2000s, the benchmark Corvette Z06 made its 505 hp from a 7.0-liter LS7, a genuinely impressive engine but one that got there the traditional way. Europe and Japan had been chasing a different metric entirely: horsepower per liter of displacement, a measure of how efficiently an engine converts its swept volume into output. Ferrari, BMW, and Porsche had been operating above 100 hp per liter for years. Chevrolet had never been close.
The car that changed it was announced at the Detroit Auto Show in January 2008, internally nicknamed the Blue Devil.
Read More: Click Here To read about this record breaker Corvette.