Two GM engineers in Bowling Green, KY, where Corvettes are assembled, were caught street racing Corvettes on the streets outside of the Assembly Plant, one doing 100 and one doing 120.
They had just left a bar.
Hope they had enough fun to tide them over during their time of unemployment. The goodwill of the town of Bowling Green is a big asset to GM and this puts a big old black eye on the plant. Dang.
My son and I toured the assembly plant a few years ago. Very worthwhile.
PTSD from the massacre.
I used to work in marketing support for GM and got calls from excited new Corvette owners who’d paid extra for pickup at the Bowling Green plant–it’s actually a standard option for 'Vettes. Tour of the plant, red carpet delivery of your new car then you drive it home to wherever you’re from–road trip right off the bat. It’s a neat service for a very fun car.
My father-in-law did this a couple of years ago, when he bought a new Corvette – he’d been a Vette fan for decades, and picking up the car at the plant was something he’d long wanted to do.
He passed away late last year, and my wife is inheriting that Vette. 
Ouch!
Didn’t they used to do something like that at Saab as well? Obviously you can’t drive it home if you live in North America, but you could pick up your Saab at the factory, head off on a tour of Sweden for a week or two in your new car, then ship it home. And I would assume the cost of shipping it was part of the package.
Volvo still offers overseas delivery in Gothenburg, Sweden.
My nephew is a GM engineer and he has driven the new Corvette.
But did he street race it at 100+mph in a 45 zone after coming from a bar? 
Years ago I had always heard that you should not drive a brand new car long distances at a steady speed. You were supposed to drive at a variety of speeds to let the seals break in properly, or something like that. Seems like picking up a car in Bowling Green and immediately driving it to California might not be a good idea? Or is this advice obsolete with respect to modern cars?
It’s been quite some years since breaking in a new engine was a thing–they come that way out of the factory. Factory delivery of a Corvette is a perfectly fine and dandy way to get to know your new sporty ride.
It’s a 4 lane road and it would only take about 4 seconds to reach 100 if they were already traveling 45 mph. Pretty easy to get stupid in that car. Made worse by doing it under the influence. But there’s a funeral chapel and a body repair shop along the way.
I have a '14 Vette. Didn’t pick it up from the factory, though.
Those guys shouldn’t have been drinking and driving but otherwise I completely understand their plight.
Corvettes have a soul, personality, and mind of their own. You find yourself talking with it like a demented ventriloquist arguing with his dummy. It’s hard to tell who is really calling the shots.
The C8 Stingray is beautiful and probably insane fun to drive.
I ever win the lottery I’m buying one, swear to gods. It’s the only true American sports car, it has a provenance no other car has and even if they do corner like trucks that straight line acceleration is a pantysplash of the first order. And they are hands down the most affordable supercar out there. When I do, I’m gonna get the factory delivery, no doubt about it and then I will drive it home like I stole it.
It’s still a thing for that kind of car. Chevy recommended not going over 4000 rpm, varying speeds, no full throttle etc for 500 miles and not participating in racing events for 1500 for Corvettes as of fairly recently at least.
I had to take my 2018 BMW M2 back for a special service at 1200 miles for them to replace ‘break in fluids’ and reset some software limits (various owner forums actually argue exactly what they do or don’t at that interval but you’re supposed to bring the car in). And stay below 4500, no kick downs (IOW flooring it to hit the kick down button and shift to lowest possible gear), before that.
So the special delivery options are actually a bit of quandary wrt break in. American buyers can accept delivery of BMW’s in Munich (though M2’s are assembled in Leipzig), the SUV factory/driving school in South Carolina or the driving school in CA. At least at latter two locations they’ll take you out on the track in an already broken in one, at least for M’s I believe. But Spartanburg SC is only around 700 miles away from my house, so I’d have been babying my car the whole way back home and then some if I’d gone back directly.
Like other ‘ridiculous speeding’ threads, on a street where you might run into other cars or pedestrians, 100-120 is not funny IMO. But there are 45 limit stretches (and certainly 55 and 65 stretches, lots of them) where the ethics of going 120 pretty much comes down to whether you think it’s wrong it violate the speed limit a lot because…you’re violating the speed limit a lot, not because of real danger to anyone outside the car. But if you wreck your car or get an extremely expensive ticket you have to accept it, likewise killing somebody in the car if you make it. If you kill yourself I guess you don’t have to accept it, because you’re dead.
I wouldn’t sweat it because I live in Oregon and between me and Bowling Green there are simply oodles of loooooooong stretches where the the speed limit is more like 75-80 and I take my Subaru up to 90+ and stay there for miles. Great big swathes of desert with dry pavement, excellent road surfaces and nobody around for miles and miles. I went from Winnemucca to Burns along 95 then 78 and there was upwards of a hundred miles where I literally saw only three cars–one was parked (probably the victim of a serial killer for all I know, there’s NOTHING out there!) and the other two were within a mile of the place I stayed the night near Burns. By the time I got to a stretch like that I’d have something like 2500 miles on the car and I’d be more than ready to let it stretch its legs a bit without damaging anyone at all. Maybe a coyote crossing the road unwisely or a jackrabbit but that’s about all there is out there. If I fuck that up and crash, well, I’d deserve it.
But I’d never drive 120 in a 45 zone, that’s just being an asshole.
That’s pretty dumb. According to GM’s own product manual:
For the first 800 km (500 mi):
[ul]
[li]Do not exceed 4000 rpm.[/li][li]Avoid driving at any one constant speed, fast or slow, including the use of cruise control.[/li][li]Avoid downshifting to brake or slow the vehicle when the engine speed will exceed 4000 rpm.[/li][/ul]
It’s not going to be a fun road trip under those conditions!
Almost surprised they don’t offer a “service” where someone just drives it around the track at like 30 mph until it’s past that point.
And how can I get that job? 