You know who has a big birthday coming next year? And by “who” I mean “what,” because this isn’t a person, like a corporation, but rather a political entity like, um, a prefecture or oblast. But bigger and better! Yes, next year will be the 250th birthday of the United States of America, the country that put people on the moon and crispy fried shells on Oreos. To celebrate this milestone, the Department of Transportation and General Motors have teamed up to make a special set of Stars and Steel edition cars, and the car the Secretary of Transportation chose to feature was, hilariously, the one GM car most famous for not being made of steel.
That’s pretty hilarious to us car geeks, but the campaign does have some positive elements, specifically a push to get people to take more road trips across America, which I think is a good thing just in general.
Still, this is all a little eye-rolly, especially in this video featuring the Corvette, a car that has been famously fiberglass from its inception in 1953:
America is truly the most beautiful country on this planet. And there’s nothing better than exploring this great nation than on the road.
Introducing the Stars and Steel Corvette, celebrating America’s 250th birthday, and @GM’s Explore250 app which maps out all the best places… pic.twitter.com/IEeRhIqnEb
— Secretary Sean Duffy (@SecDuffy) December 15, 2025
You’d think somebody involved with the Stars and Steel campaign would have said “hey, we should either get a car that’s actually made of steel or rename this whole thing to Freedom and Fiberglass, or something.” I mean, GM has plenty of other Stars and Steel options:
Okay, so everything else is a truck of some kind, but still. At least they’re steel! Seriously, though, Secretary of Transportation Sean Duffy (who you may remember from the hit show Duffy the Dampire Delayer) should have known better, and, ideally, confirmed the steel or lack thereof with some manner of official Department of Transportation magnet, the same one they use to check for Bondo on official government vehicles.
Now, of course GM is aware of this. In fact, they have a whole disclaimer pop up on the website:
It’s also worth noting that this isn’t the first time GM has gotten into the piggyback on America’s birthday racket; back in 1974, a full two years early, they made a bunch of “Spirit of America” cars, including America’s shame, the Vega! There was also a Nova and an Impala:
There were also rumors of a Spirit of America El Camino, but that has yet to be officially confirmed.
Anyway, the takeaway here is that Corvettes are fiberglass. It’s weird to stick a “Stars and Steel” badge on these!
Top graphic image: GM
Is there any hope that the engineering and design teams at GM will assassinate some of the marketing people? The Blackwing twins, the Volt and the C8 had me convinced the General under Mary B was done with firearm assisted podiatry
gm- Cram it sideways. US content of a sample gm products;
Envision 8%
Terrain 11%
Silverado 38%
Corvette 41%
I said CRAM IT – sideways hard.
GM should have just named it “Orange Peel” and said it was to honor the glorious leader’s daily skin regimen, and not an indictment into their paint quality on the Corvette.
They should add the tattered flag Punisher skull to complete the look.
Also, take more road trips! (a.k.a use more fossil fuels!)
Wait. Did anyone else just read this as the Stares and Steal Corvette too?
Eh there’s some steel in a Corvette somewhere
Plastic car being part of a steel campaign is like when people say “yeah well we’re the country that went to the moon!” -bragging about something you did almost 60yrs ago.
…I await the limited editions of the other kind of (actually steel) Stingrays that I hope are announced soon.
barf
Really wish they’d have represented the flag properly, in color.
The flag is red, white, and blue, not grayscale.
Not according to the back windows of half the jeeps and a quarter of the pickups I see. Other than that one stripe that’s sometimes blue…
Also the tattered grayscale flag. I’m not sure of the message these people are trying to convey, but I’m pretty sure whatever it is, it wouldn’t sit well with me.
Anyhow this is all very on-brand for GM.
I recently bought a hitch cover for my truck, I had to look hard to find one that wasn’t a Punisher skull or tattered flag, or some combo of the two.
I finally found one that was a pawprint.
One blue? I thought there was a red one, a blue one, and maybe a Roman numeral “III” inside the stars…that’s a license to ill!
Colors aren’t manly! Everything has to maximum BUTCH!
There’s more steel in a Corvette than a man can eat in one go. Crank, cams, fasteners, springs, dampers, locks, the key. Imagine even trying to eat it!
That’s a lot of steel.
Pretty sure the key is plastic and silicon, plus lithium in the battery.
No emergency physical key? Most cars have one buried in the fob.
OK, I’ll give you the emergency key and the little spring that holds it in place.
Torch! You forgot the Free Spirit bicentennial edition of 75-76 of the Buick Century. Old boat A-Body.
While visiting a friend last summer in Fayetteville North Carolina, I saw a very weathered example at a gas station driven by some older 60s – 70s old lady…
Was neat too see just normal- car driven.
I’m stoked to rip donuts while holding Roman candles and a flag out of the sunroof next summer. ????????!
They should have patterned with Chevy and Ford so balance the two big US manufacturers equally. That way they could have used the Corvette and the F-150, really make the steel branding make sense.
Oh. I get it since the Corvette is mostly Fiberglass and the F-150 is mostly aluminum.
Where’d all the rusty steel go? Maybe we should make it all extra historic using some old American 70’s iron and call it Stars and Rust? Anyone?
Geez, just call it Stars and Cars and be done with it. Duffy, last time I saw that idiot he was in a pull-up duel against RFK Jr. at an airport. This is the guy in charge of overhauling the air traffic control system? I’ll never fly again.
I will look forward to seeing every single Stars & Steel Corvette built gradually trickling across the auction blocks in the 2050s and 2060s with triple digit mileages and plastic still on the seats
(Mr. Regular voice) RARE! RARE! RARE!
“This one was built on Tuesday! One of a kind!”
Hahahahahahha that pop up! What a time to be alive.
So Sean Duffy is now a car sales rep for the Trump Admin. He can add that to his C.V. to go with his prior stints as a Lumberjack and a Fox News host.
I’ll add this just for fun: The Lumberjack song by Monty Python.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=FshU58nI0Ts
Pretty much everybody in his administration has that stereotypical used car salesman vibe going on. I swear Pete Hegseth tried to sell me a BMW seven or eight years ago.
Thank you for the laugh. I had hoped they would get tired of shoveling shit to hawk terrible stuff at people. The bottom of the barrel has never been scraped more completely.
Ah yes the Corvette, the famously 12th most American made car. Bested only by rolling Americana like: Honda Passport (#5), Odyssey (#9), Rigdeline (also #9), and VW ID.4 (#s 7, 8, 9).
They seem to award a lot of ties. If I counted right, there are 27 cars that are more “American” than the Corvette.
Also, GM overall has gone from a dismal 66% TDC (total domestic content) in 2015 to a mighty 54% in 2024.
https://kogod.american.edu/autoindex/2024
oh oh do the part where you compare this against literally any other index!! They all give different answers…
“Clears throat pedantically”, the frame of the corvette is steel, well, parts of it are, well, sometimes not even that as I know at least the c6 z06/zr1 actually had an aluminum frame, magnesium front cradle, aluminum rear cradle. Basically no steel.
So, yea dumb, but I am not surprised at all. GM is just cashing in on the publicity and the Corvette is hard to argue against in being a very iconic American car.
The politicians I would expect no less than to whiff on this kind of thing. Didn’t Trump have a post early this year about bringing back American built cars but grabbed a literal communist Soviet era car for the background? This seems to align well with that stupidity.
You make me wonder: do Morgans still have a wooden frame?
Partially, yeah, they still incorporate some structural wood in the body, but its kind of deliberately designed-in as their trademark vs a real necessity at this point
They never had a wood chassis. They had/have a wood framed body to hold the sheet metal in place like every car did from the teens to the mid 1930s.
The entire chassis of all C8 ‘vettes is aluminum. Some parts cast, some extruded, some hydroformed. Then it’s welded or bonded together.
If I remember correctly, the Grand Sport C6 brought the aluminum frame down market and it has been on all corvettes across the board for the C7 and C8 generations.
So yeah, a very big portion of the car that is metal is still not steel.
Never knew much about C7s, but they do have aluminum tubs as well. Good to know. I only knew about 8’s since I see so many at the office in winter, snow tires and all.
The c6 grand sport had a steel frame, it was a base model but had wide fenders, plus the brakes, dry sump, and cooling bits from the z06. But yes, very little steel remains on corvettes at this point.
Thank you for verifying, I couldn’t remember if the base c8s were steel.
Now they need to make this a 0-250-0 in 25.0 sec. Corvette!
https://share.google/zqsrprFA8FEJbN5Tx
Most thing Sean Duffy is involved in are eye rolley.
My Mom had a Sprit of America Nova (hatchback!) back in the day.
I think his airport pull-up competition with RFKJ might be the actual low point in American history.
Lowest point in American history so far. /Homer Simpson/
I’m sure they have steel in them somewhere, the frame is not fiberglass is it? How about seat frames? Just how much steel is needed? Are the steel options all steel? Noooo. Did you notice in the movie Planes, Trains, and Automobiles very little time was spent in the plane like none, the Train hardly anytime, and the automobile burnt up the night they rented it. Just having fun don’t anyone get butt hurt.
Nice to see Saturn getting some press again; haven’t heard much about them lately.
Wait, am I wrong to have gotten excited the Fiero’s coming back?!
you think that guy in Wicked was named Fiero by accident? Its marketing!
No, that’s the spiky-haired loud chef guy.
<puts on pre-war hat>
Weren’t most GM cars not entirely steel bodies prior to mid-1936?
I just want you to know that “pre-war hat” got me way too good, hahaha
Why is the Secretary of Transportation endorsing GM products specifically? I would be pissed about this if I worked at another manufacturer.
Eh, maybe they’re not mad at it this time.
Just be glad it’s not Tesla. They do top the lists of most American-sourced parts so, sadly, it probably should have been.
The most American and most steel vehicle made to today must be the Cybertruck. Hmm, wonder why the Trump administration didn’t go with that one?
It’s not like GM has many “cars” to choose from anymore, and a Caddy (the only other actual *car*) probably isn’t proletarian enough for a politician.