2013 Corvette C7 Z06: Pop the Top, Mr. Bow Tie!

Sweet new Corvette on the way for 2013. All the PR snaps suggest a wholesale makeover of America's sports car: in its place we get the first car of the future that actually looks like one of those cars we were promised in the pages of Popular Science back when we were kids.

Out back, current intel says the four glowing Vette reds that have pierced our night dreamscapes for 50 years running have been cast to the ages in favor of the warp-speed starship treatment. Sideswipe from the Transformers franchise gets the styling nod for this extreme makeover, and worthy it is.

No complaints on the proposed downsized engines. Even sixes are OK historically, so long as they put the hurt on the time-space continuum way more better than the wheezy old Vette sixes of the 50s. Maybe call the sixes Blue Flames.

About that Z06 engine, though. It just has to keep sucking four-hundred-twenty-seven cubes give-or-take of atmosphere and blowing it out in anger as it rockets down the bitumen ribbons of our post-Judgment-Day future. Nothing less will do.

Please, Chevy: forget about assigning all the super-high output stuff to blowers, as that's just all so What-do-you-do-when-you're-stuck-with-such-a-wittle-engine-Mustang-Cobra-ish. Keep the ZR1 for bragging rights if you must, but blown so Ain't Vette.

While we're keeping the all-engine 427 screamer dear, let's keep your insistence on the fixed roof undear.

Pop the top on that Z06, Chevy. We want to feel the velocity of Bowling Green Bad Ass in our ... well ... um ... all over our shiny midlife domes. A targa roof, not Barbie's folding top, is all we ... I ... this office of government, an office as legit and powerful as any Middle East regime today, or at least as legit and powerful as any web wanker's blog, ask(s).

Closed Corvettes are fine for committed albinos, but otherwise just lame. All that raw passion and all that engineering talent and all those bucks for a six-figure Corvette and the fortunate few are supposed to wheel down the byways separated by the same mouse fur toupée that Camry loungers depend on to keep their street lives rolling Livingroom Style?

Can't happen. If this continues we Corvette Faithful are going to be forced to buy those plain old standard Corvettes which make way more sense anyway.

Dodge can make a fully convertible Viper that hangs with your No-sun-for-you-mobile. Ferraris and Lambos manage as well.

In 2013 there will be nothing cooler than tooling around town in a 427 Corvette Sideswipe.

Except being seen, sun-tanned and wind-tousled, in one.

I am The Car Czar, and I'm here to help.