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CORVETTE TODAY #150, Corvette Chief Engineer, Josh Holder, Talks Everything Mechanically About E-Ray
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Jul 11, 2025
On this very special 150th regular episode of CORVETTE TODAY, Corvette Chief Engineer, Josh Holder, comes back to the show to talk about everything E-Ray, but from a mechanical and technological point of view. Your CORVETTE TODAY host, Steve Garrett, really delves into the technology that makes this 2024 Corvette E-Ray so special. You'll learn how the two engines (the electric front engine and the internal combustion engine in the back) work together, how the E-Ray generates and recovers electrical power. Josh even talks about his favorite thing about the E-Ray! It's a special 150th regular episode of CORVETTE TODAY with Corvette Chief Engineer, Josh Holder!
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0:00
[Music] Welcome to Corvette Today, the podcast
0:06
that talks about everything Corvette with your host Steve Garrett, MC and DJ at one of the largest Corvette weekends
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in the country, Corvette Funfest, president of the Corvette Club of Kansas City, Missouri, and radio disc jockey at
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the number one radio station in Kansas City for over 40 years. Here's Steve Garrett.
0:28
Thanks for listening and watching Corvette Today, the show that talks about everything Corvette and the only
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current podcast dedicated to Corvette. I'm your host, Steve Garrett. I appreciate you tuning in. Corvette Today
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Corvette enthusiasts from around the world. My guest on today's show is a return guest on Corvette today. He is
2:33
the chief engineer for Corvette and he's here to talk more in detail about the new 2024,
2:40
but from a technical and engineering perspective. He's Mr. Josh Holder. Josh, it's great to have you back on Corvette
2:46
today. Well, thanks Steve. Thanks for having me back. First of all, Josh, this is such a
2:52
revolutionary Corvette. Talk about what the time frame is that it takes to design and develop a car like the -ay.
2:59
Well, Steve, we planned the -ay from the conception of the eighth generation
3:04
architecture. And so, it's hard and kind of unfair to use that necessarily as a starting point for the development of
3:10
the -ray, but we worked knowing that we were going to do this car, we were going
3:16
to do this electrification to enhance the performance of the eighth generation Corvette. And so, it was planned that
3:22
way from the beginning. We also have a very measured approach to introduction of Corvette. you know, we start with a
3:28
stingray and then we move up from there. So, we planned from the beginning that while it was going to be a part of the
3:34
architecture, it wasn't going to be introduced at the outset. Some of the early work scoping battery sizes and
3:40
power delivery and all that stuff was started quite a while ago, but the final details of course actually we're still
3:47
working on final stages of development, validation of the car are ongoing. So, it's been quite a long process, but it's
3:53
not continuous where people through that entire duration are working constantly on the development of the car. And
3:59
that's sort of the way Corvettes always worked and it's how we have such a good formula, right? Our variants are not an
4:04
afterthought or an add-on in a way that makes a suboptimized Corvette. We try to plan as much as we can from the outset.
4:11
Nice. Now, Josh, this has 20 and 21in wheels on the front and back instead of
4:16
19s and 20s. Let's talk about the switch over and the move to a larger size as well.
4:22
Yeah. So, there's a few reasons for it. First of which, the front wheel is needed by necessity. The diameter of the
4:28
wheel has to clear the carbon ceramic brakes. The rears had some creative influence. I'll say certainly styling of
4:35
wheels is very important in any car, especially a sports car. We know how passionate our customers are about
4:41
wheels and the way they can make the car look, the aggressive stance of it. I'll tell you that a lot of engineers cringe
4:47
when we start talking about large wheels because they're generally heavier. They have higher inertia. And so we balance
4:54
that. We work closely with the guys in the studio getting the best style we can, but we only do things on Corvette
5:00
that are absolutely necessary to enhance performance. And so the wheels and tires on the -ay were needed largely to clear
5:07
the brakes up front. And then another example of planning ahead. Since we use
5:12
those same sizes on the Z06, we were able to borrow from Z06 the PS4s tire
5:19
from Michelin as an available summer tire. It's the same tire. So we got a head start in development of that tire.
5:24
These 19s and 20s work with. And of course, we knew we wanted to do the widebody, the great big tractive
5:30
footprint that works really well with an all-wheel drive car. You think about the width of the front and rear tires all
5:36
together. have a tire contact pack patch of more than four feet. Wow. And so all that rubber touching the road
5:43
and that kind of power and delivery, that's why you get an acceleration time like 2 and a half seconds. Wow. That's amazing. Now, I know we've
5:49
got the LT2 engine from the Stingray, but the electric engine in the front drives the front wheels. I know that
5:56
those two engines operate separate and independent from each other. How the heck did you get that to work out like
6:02
that? Well, we took a modular approach. So, the rear engine and the front motor work
6:08
together, but we designed the battery to fit in the central tunnel. The front
6:14
drive unit was packaged, like I said, from the beginning to fit behind the front compartment, so we didn't have to
6:20
sacrifice storage space in the front compartment. There's a lot of good reasons for doing it, but a great reason
6:25
is the flexibility allows us with manufacturing at Bowling Green. If you think about the complexity there and all
6:30
the work that they have to do when we can keep commonality where possible, like everything in the rear of the car,
6:36
a common body structure, it allows for more efficient assembly. Nice. Now, the -ray is 300 lb heavier
6:44
than the Z06. Is that all battery and engine in the front? It's not. Well, it's really more like
6:50
280, but that's because I'm counting. But not all battery. The battery itself,
6:56
the cells of the battery are about 80 pounds. As I mentioned, the battery is a modular construction. So, it includes
7:03
what we call the power electronics. So, that's the inverter and the modules that control power flow in and out of the
7:09
battery and and through the front drive motor. So, that unit together is about 100 pounds. The drive unit itself is
7:15
about 81 lb. But if you think about the efficiency of that mass to deliver 160
7:21
horsepower and only weigh 81 lb, the stator is about the size of a coffee
7:26
can. The motor is really compact. The housing is made from magnesium. The
7:32
fasteners that hold it together are made from aluminum. And so while this electrification added mass for the
7:38
components that we put into the car, our goal from the beginning was to make sure that the added performance, this added
7:44
power delivery to the front axle, not only carried its own mass, so the mass that we added, but it improved the
7:50
overall performance of the car. So it carries itself and then some of the car to give this outstanding performance
7:55
that the -ray offers. Man, that's amazing. Now, you alluded to this just a minute ago, but let's talk
8:00
more about these Michelin allseason tires. This is a true four-season car. I'm sure it took a lot of time to get
8:07
these things developed. And like you said, they are the widest allseason tire ever made. Isn't that correct?
8:13
That's right. We have a strong partnership with Michelin that's helped us through tire development. You know, the same guys that work on the
8:18
production car, help with the race car. And so, I would say allseason tires have come a long way in the last decade or
8:25
so. They used to be a big compromise. Frankly, to get any kind of realistic allseason performance, you were
8:31
sacrificing a lot of dry traction capability. Starting even with the C7, we took big steps forward in an
8:37
allseason tire. We kept that same formula and development of technology going into the eighth generation, but
8:43
now we're doing it with a much larger big wide tire that is not only four season capable, but in the dry
8:49
conditions, high traction conditions where most people are going to exercise their Corvette, they still provide 1G of
8:55
lateral grip. So, a lot of outstanding dry traction performance with true four-season capability.
9:01
That's outstanding for sure. Well, buddy, let's take our first break and when we come back, we're going to talk more about the engines. I've got Josh
9:08
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I'm your host, Steve Garrett. With me is the chief engineer for Corvette, Josh Holder. We're talking technical stuff
13:06
here for the new 2024. Josh, there is speculation when the C8 came out. We kind of touched on this
13:13
that the center tunnel was going to hold all those batteries or be the electrical or hybrid setup. It was designed with
13:20
the future in mind, wasn't it? Yeah, it sure was, Steve. And of course, we saw the speculation and this time
13:26
turned out to be true. But I would say that even though the central tunnel in a eighth generation Corvette doesn't house
13:32
a drive shaft and exhaust pipes like previous Corvettes had, we would still have a central tunnel. Every Corvette,
13:39
as you know, is a convertible. Even the coupe, you can take the roof out. And so we use what we call a central tunnel
13:45
backbone. So that's the area between the seats underneath the console to get as large a section as possible. That's what
13:52
makes lightweight efficient structures. So we can manage torsional rigidity and
13:57
bending rigidity. So if you think about a car with the roof out, when you don't have the roof to react those loads,
14:02
you've got to find something else. The typical solution is a big tall rocker that makes getting in and out of the car
14:08
really awkward. Since C5, really, we've taken this strategy and it's worked out well for us. When we designed the -ay
14:15
from the outset of the eighth generation Corvette architecture, a large center tunnel was never in doubt. The part we
14:21
optimized with our partners working on the battery was the size of that. We didn't want to miss an opportunity for
14:28
significantly more battery capacity just for a few millimeters. We also didn't
14:33
want to design the battery in some optimized way where we're encroaching on the occupant space. And so designing the
14:40
battery and the way it's packaged internally with the section of the tunnel is what allowed that to nest
14:46
perfectly and do what it does to provide the performance for the -ay. Very nice. Now the battery is integrated
14:52
obviously. Talk about how the battery delivers power and how it regenerates power.
14:58
Yeah. So the battery has a inverter module that's part of what we call the
15:03
power electronics integrated towards the front of the battery and that delivers
15:08
three-phase current to the electric motor. The electric motor is also a generator. So when you're decelerating,
15:17
slowing down, sometimes even coasting, say down a hill for example, the motor becomes a generator and it's feeding
15:23
power back into the battery. Obviously when you're on the tall pedal, it's going the other way. The battery is
15:29
delivering energy, delivering power to the electric motor. So, if you think about what we're doing here with
15:34
electrification on -ay, we're really using the kinetic energy that exists in any car to repurpose it in a way that
15:41
improves the way the car performs. Now, is driving the -ray a different feel than like the Stingray or the Z06?
15:48
It is. It's very different. It's special in its own way. We often use the term
15:53
torque immediacy. And what I mean by that is the feel of for those that have driven a big block
15:59
Corvette, you'll know what I'm talking about. But the feel of that instantaneous torque available all the
16:06
time, anytime is something that makes the E-Ray very special. We balanced the output of the front electric motor and
16:13
the torque curve of the LT2 engine to be additive complimentary to each other.
16:19
There's some electrified sports cars that will use it to fill a hole that the
16:24
internal combustion engine leaves, for example. But our mission on this car was to make them complement each other. So
16:30
when the engine's delivering its near peak power, so is the electric motor. Same with torque. Of course, those that
16:35
understand electric motors know that peak torque on an electric motor is actually at zero RPM. It will hold that
16:41
peak even through lower RPM. So, you can imagine as you're not just accelerating from a dead stop, which of course the
16:47
-ray is the quickest Corvette ever, but even passing in sporty driving on back
16:52
roads, you'll feel an instantaneous rush with just a twitch of your foot with all the power delivery and the traction
16:59
available on an E-Ray. Man, I can't wait to get behind the wheel. Josh, now we've got two new
17:04
modes. We've got stealth mode and shuttle mode. Talk about these two modes and how you guys engineered these
17:10
things. Yeah. So, stealth mode is a really cool feature. Actually, the way
17:15
you get into this mode when you first get to the car, you can rotate the drive mode and select whether you want to just
17:21
start the car normally and let the engine and front drive motor work together or if you want to use only the
17:28
front drive motor, only the electric motor in a pure electric vehicle kind of a mode. And so, stealth is one of those
17:35
modes. The intent behind that, the most common use case we think would be like a neighborhood exit. So for those of us
17:41
that leave early in the morning, we like to drive our Corvettes as much as possible. Maybe our neighbors don't
17:46
appreciate that loud bark from the garage next to them early in the morning. This is a way to kind of sneak
17:52
away out of your neighborhood quietly. And then of course when you want the internal combustion engine, all you got
17:57
to do is either exceed 45 miles an hour or just give it a twitch of your foot and the engine will start automatically
18:04
and seamlessly. You get that full power delivery. Nice. The other function is what we call
18:10
shuttle mode. So that is intended for say moving your car around in a garage
18:15
or in a parking lot or something like that. You know, a lot of customers that store their Corvettes and maybe want to
18:22
get access to an area in their garage and they're going to move it around. You can select shuttle mode. The difference
18:27
between shuttle and stealth is that shuttle will never start the internal combustion engine. It's not meant for
18:33
on-road use. It's kind of garage type scenarios. You're speed limited to 15 miles an hour. So, it wouldn't be good
18:39
on the road anyway. It's just another feature and another way we can use the hardware that we've packaged in the
18:45
front drive unit. Nice. And just like the Z06, we still have three radiators. Are they the same
18:50
as the Z06? Yes. So, the three front radiators are the same, but actually in the front of
18:56
the car, there are five. So, we've added two more with the -ay. One of them is a
19:02
oil cooler. In fact, you can see it if you look closely in the front fascia on the driver's side, you'll be able to see
19:08
these vertically mounted fins that are that front radiator. It's intended to cool the oil for the front drive unit.
19:15
So, it's an air to oil heat exchanger. The front drive unit oil is used to lubricate obviously and cool the front
19:22
drive unit. It also happens to be a dry sump system. So, just like the internal combustion engine, we're really worried
19:28
about efficiency in an electric motor as well. We want to keep all those rotating parts out of the oil and use a dry sump
19:34
and lubrication to the points where it's really intended. And to manage the heat
19:39
that gets built up in there, we cool that with that small heat exchanger in the front of the car. On the other side,
19:44
it's not as visible when looking at the car, but we use what we call a condenser radiator. So, where the condenser lives
19:52
on the right side of the car, the bottom about third of that is actually another
19:57
radiator. And so, that radiator has a separate dedicated loop, deionized water
20:02
and glycol to keep it stable below freezing. And that's used to cool the power electronics. That's the component
20:09
I talked about before that converts the DC into three-phase to feed the electric motor and vice versa for energy back
20:16
into the battery. Those power electronics generate a lot of heat with all that current flowing through them. And so we have to cool those down with
20:22
that system. And then finally, the cells themselves, batteries really want to be
20:28
in an optimal temperature to work most efficiently, and they actually don't want to be too cold or too hot. And so
20:34
we have what we call a chiller in the rear of the car. And that uses refrigerant Freon that's in the air
20:41
conditioning system to transfer energy into a heat exchanger that feeds a
20:47
dedicated loop into the battery cells themselves. Wow, that's amazing. Well, buddy, let's
20:53
take our final break and when we come back, we'll talk more about the 2024 and all the technical aspects of it with
21:00
Chief Engineer Josh Holder for Corvette here on Corvette Today.
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I'm your host, Steve Garrett. With me is Corvette chief engineer Josh Holder. We're talking everything technical on
23:31
the 2024. Josh, in this third and final segment, honestly, this car is a engineering
23:37
marvel. Mechanically, the front is separate from the back. What are the specifics on how those things work
23:43
together and cohesively? Well, thanks Steve. We think this is an engineering marvel, too. We might be biased, but there was certainly a lot of
23:50
thought and effort put into the layout of the car and the way both the front drive unit and the small block engine
23:56
work together. In technicality, it would be considered a P4 hybrid, but this is really done in a way that no one else is
24:03
really doing, at least in performance hybrids. Separating the drive unit from the rear engine allows us to do that
24:10
modular type of design and construction I talked about. But because they are disconnected and only connected really
24:16
through the road, we have some really smart control systems that manage the torque delivery between the front drive
24:22
unit and the small block engine. Those control systems determine when to deliver power to the front axle, when to
24:29
shift power to the rear, and how to take it away from both and manage it through
24:35
clever chassis control. So, what the driver feels is this sort of seamless interface of power and performance where
24:42
all these things working in the background are making the car feel as though it were mechanically connected
24:47
and all working together. And I think it's so cool, Josh, that this is not a plug-in hybrid. Obviously,
24:53
we got other brands that are doing that. Was that something that you were specifically targeting and trying not to
24:58
do, trying not to do a plug-in hybrid? I would say that the architecture of this
25:03
battery, it's really small in terms of today's EV battery standards, only 1.9
25:09
kilwatt hours, but it can handle really high power flows. And that was designed intentionally so that we could do this
25:16
quick regeneration and then significant power output when the driver commands it. And because it can regenerate so
25:23
quickly, there really isn't a need to plug it in. You don't have to worry about it. It maintains a what we call
25:29
state of charge. In fact, they have a feature called charge plus which the driver can select that will move the
25:36
high voltage battery state of charge to a higher level. There's some different use cases for this, but I call it
25:42
planning for your next maneuver. So, say for example, you're coming home and the next morning you want to drive as far as
25:49
you can in pure EV mode. You might hit charge plus and let that battery top off and then you're all set to go. You can
25:54
also imagine a scenario. You're driving the -ay on a racetrack. You're hauling the mail and decide, "Hey, I want to do
26:00
a hero lap." And so I'll charge up as much as I can to hit charge plus, build
26:06
charge in, and then switch back out of that and go as quick as I can to set my best lap time. So, this is a way that
26:13
the driver can tailor where they want their state of charge to live, but they really don't have to think about it
26:18
beyond that because all these fancy control systems work in a very high-tech way to keep the battery in its optimal
26:24
condition. That's really cool. Now, knowing what's on the market right now, I know that you guys benchmarked the Z06
26:31
with Porsche and Ferrari. Was there a benchmark for the -ay or something else that was out there that you looked at
26:36
and said, "Okay, we want to benchmark the -ray versus this car." We don't really do benchmarks in the way
26:43
most people think of benchmarking a product. We check in on our competitors
26:48
to see what they do well. Not everybody does everything well, which is why we
26:54
check in on many. But if you think about evaluating a competitive vehicle that's
26:59
in production now, especially in a sports car market, by the time you would
27:05
react to that solution or that technology, it would already be old. And so we design and engineer Corvette with
27:11
our own targets in mind, our own way of enhancing the driving experience. And as
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we go along, we will, like I said, sort of check in on the competitor. Obviously, we respect our competitors.
27:24
We want to know what they're doing, but we never, especially never, pick one single car and say we want to try to do
27:30
everything this car does just a little bit better. We pave our own way and the car shows for it.
27:35
I think so, too. And that's actually a good idea. You take the best aspects of different cars and make it better for
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the Corvette. That's really a smart idea. Yes. Also, to me, little things make a big difference. And I love the startup
27:47
animation on the driver information center. Talk about that and what you did differently for Stingray, for Z06, and
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then foray. So like the Stingray and like the Z06, the -ray does have its own unique, we
28:00
call it welcome animation. So when you open the door and sit in the seat, you'll see this animation play on the
28:06
instrument panel cluster. In the case of the -ay, we're going to highlight what's special about the -ay, obviously. So, we
28:11
show the battery and the front drive unit in this hidden kind of background overlaid with the exterior of the car,
28:18
and you'll sort of see it come to life much the way we do the Stingray and the Z06. But, of course, in the -ray, we're
28:24
highlighting what's special about the E-Ray. It's one of the many things we do to show that, hey, not only is this a
28:29
Corvette, this is a special and different Corvette. And here's one of the reasons why. Now with the electronic
28:35
hybrid now you have different things on the navigation screen as well, not necessarily just the DIC. Talk about
28:42
what you see now on the navigation screen and what the goals were for that and all the extra things that the driver
28:49
will see. So, we're really excited about what we call the -ray performance app, but it's a completely separate display
28:56
only available in the -ay that shows up on the center screen that will show what we call power flows, but it shows where
29:03
the power is going either out to the motor or back into the battery. It shows the power output of both the front drive
29:11
motor and the small block LT2. We show state of charge of the battery and it's
29:17
all done graphically over a ghosted view of the car itself and we will light up
29:24
in different colors. For example, the front drive unit whether you're regening or using power from the front drive
29:30
unit. It's a really engaging, entertaining thing to look at. We've all gotten used to probably staring at
29:36
either our album art or our nav screen even though we know where we're going. This is something really engaging and
29:42
lets drivers really get into the details about what their E-Ray is doing. And not only that screen that's in there, but
29:49
there's also a dyno page that will graphically show what each of the drive unit and the internal combustion engine
29:55
is doing. At the end of a trip, you can zoom in and out of that. You can actually play back on the screen to see
30:01
what was I doing in this maneuver, what was the drive unit doing in cases where you can't necessarily study all that
30:06
data and concentrate on driving. And then there's one last screen that will summarize the overall performance of
30:12
that drive cycle, show you what kind of efficiencies you got from the front drive motor and the power used. It's a
30:18
really cool, engaging, and neat piece of technology that also makes the E-Ray special.
30:23
That's really cool. Buddy, like I said, congratulations on this. It's a technological marvel. Have we forgotten
30:31
anything? Is there anything else that we should be covering on this show that we can talk about for the -ay? I could go on and on. I would just say I
30:38
often get asked about any Corvette, what's my favorite part of the car? I think most people are thinking pick a
30:43
piece of hardware and talk about what you like about it. My answer is the same. My favorite part about this car is
30:49
driving it. It's really, really a joy to drive. It's different than the Z06. The
30:55
Z06 is visceral and kind of raw intentionally. We made it that way on purpose. It's a track focused weapon and
31:02
it's the best Corvette for that mission. The E-Ray, I'd say, is a more refined, approachable Grand Touring car. It still
31:09
can do the best carving on back roads, but now maybe you can exercise the car in a way without having to worry about
31:15
what the weather's going to do or where you're going to be because it really does come with that extra bonus of all
31:20
weather capability. We call it the Swiss Army knife of Corvette. It does a lot of things very well.
31:26
That's perfect. That is absolutely perfect, buddy. Thanks again for being on Corvette today. Love having you on.
31:32
Looking forward to seeing you soon, probably at the birthday bash, right? Yeah, I think I'll be there. Sounds good. Thanks a lot.
31:39
Thank you, Steve. Thanks for listening to Corvette Today. And please be sure to tell your family, friends, and other Corvette enthusiasts
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32:26
You've been listening to Corvette Today with Steve Garrett. If you'd like to contact Steve with any thoughts on the
32:32
podcast or ideas for guests on Corvette Today, you can email him at stevegared
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Steve Garrett DJ. Thanks again for listening to Corvette today.
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