Barbie’s Corvette: Is The Car From Barbie Land A Proper Corvette? All You Need To Know About Barbie’s Corvette

Barbie! It is the new talk of the town. It is just a few days since the movie was released in theaters across several markets. In the UAE though, it is expected to be released on 31 August. Before viewers watch the much-awaited movie on the big screens, we decided it was time to draw your attention to the cars used in the movie, specifically the pink Corvette.

If you’re a car enthusiast and have watched the Barbie trailer, you would have noticed the pink Corvette. The Corvette is one of the most iconic cars ever produced and it is easy to see just why it was picked for the blockbuster movie. However, there is more to this Corvette than meets the eye and some of the fasts might just leave you astonished. There are a few other cars in the movie too.

Well, it’s time to ‘Hi Barbie’ and take a look at the Barbie cars.

First introduced in 1953, the Corvette is the only sports car produced by a mainstream American manufacturer. General Motors developed and has so far manufactured eight generations of the Corvette under the Chevrolet brand. Although, the Corvette has its own logo and has become a bigger name than Chevrolet. However, it still remains Chevrolet’s Halo product. 

The eight generations of the Corvette are all named sequentially from C1 to C8, with the C8 launched in 2020, being the most modern generation yet. The very first Corvette debuted with an inline-6 petrol engine and it instantly turned into a massive success story for GM. In 1955, it was launched with a V8 engine and since then, there’s been no looking back. Over the years, the Corvette became sportier, more powerful, and only got better in terms of design as well. 

In order to understand the Barbie Corvette, one first has to understand the movie. It is about Barbie (Margot Robbie) and Ken (Ryan Gosling) who live in Barbie Land along with other Barbies and Kens and all is well until one day when Barbie decides to go to the real world and Ken joins her.

Since they live in Barbie Land, which is basically a toy land, the houses, and cars are much smaller than in real life. Hence, the Corvette used by Barbie had to be much smaller than the original. Other cars used in the movie which include a GMC Hummer and a VW Camper van also needed to be smaller to fit into Barbie Land.

As a result of this premise, the makers of the movie had to custom-build the cars from scratch. It does look like Corvette C1, but the similarities end right there. The car is 23 percent smaller than a real-world Corvette and yet it needed to have a second row of seating to accommodate Ken. 

Hence, the car had to be custom-built from scratch. Every single component on the Barbie Corvette was custom designed and built by  Picture Vehicles, which is the company that made the vehicles used in the movie. A total of five such Corvettes were created for the movie.

Given the smaller size, there were space constraints and there’s no way a V8 would fit in there. It isn’t even powered by an inline-4. Instead, the ‘Corvette’ driven by Margot Robbie in the movie was powered by a little electric motor from a Golf buggy! Ouch!

If you’re a car enthusiast, there’s more bad news. Margot Robbie didn’t really drive the car in the movie. In fact, there are no throttle or brake pedals in the car. The gauges and switches are non-existent. They are, in fact, stickers on a flat panel. Instead, the car was driven remotely via a VR remote. This was apparently done in order to allow Margot Robbie to concentrate on the filming rather than on driving. Bye, Barbie!

The custom-built Corvettes created for the Barbie movie certainly wouldn’t cost as much as the standard real-world sports cars. Given that they were considerably smaller and powered by a small electric motor, producing these cars wouldn’t have cost much. However, exact numbers aren’t available at the moment. 

After starring in the movie though, the value of these cars are certain to have shot up. We expect to see at least one of them turn up at an auction sooner or later. On the other hand, the first three generations of the real-world Corvette are now considered classics and are quite expensive to buy. 

A 1967 Chevrolet Corvette L88 sold at auction for an eye-watering $3.85 million (AED 14.4 million). In the UAE, prices of new Corvettes for sale start at around AED 450,000 while prices of used Corvettes for sale in the UAE start at around AED 60,000 and go up to around AED 900,000.

Would you pick the Corvette if you were Barbie? Or do you have other cars in mind? Let us know in the comments below.

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