What Year Was The Split-Window Corvette And How Much Is One Worth Today?

The split-window Corvette is an iconic design that has become a permanent part of the Corvette lexicon. It was created at a time when styling was a very strong force at General Motors and all of its divisions. 

Since its introduction at the General Motors Motorama in 1953, the Corvette has been a style leader for the Chevrolet Division. As the first generation Corvette, known as the C1, was coming to the end of its production run in 1962, the next generation C2 was being prepared. Legendary GM designer Bill Mitchell was at the helm, and he had something very special in mind for the 1963 Corvette. Mitchell took his inspiration from the stingray, an aquatic creature that moves easily through the water. 

The 1963 Corvette Sting Ray Coupe used its unique split-window design to showcase a roof-to-tail "spine" that suggested the actual tail of a stingray. The resulting car was a styling tour-de-force from the moment it was introduced, but this apparent innovation was short-lived, going away for good after the 1963 model year.

The 1963-only Chevrolet Corvette Sting Ray split-window Coupe caused a great deal of negative reaction among the people who had purchased one that year. Chevrolet got a tremendous amount of feedback from these Corvette drivers, complaining that their rear vision was seriously impaired by the solid bar bisecting their car's rear window,which appeared to be an excellent styling feature when viewed from the outside but simply did not make sense from the driver's perspective. Practicality won out over design, and a one-piece rear window would replace the split window from 1964 through the end of the C2's run in 1967. 

The 1963 Corvette, which was made as both coupe and convertible, boasted several additional firsts as well. The '63 'Vette was the first to have independent rear suspension, the first to have hideaway headlights, the first to have no externally accessible trunk, and the first to be called Sting Ray (which would later be shortened to just Stingray). 

Both rear window designs have their fans, but the Chevrolet Corvette market has spoken about resale values – the 1963 Corvette Sting Ray split-window Coupe is a much more desirable bird due to its relative rarity (one production year vs. four years for the solid-window version). A total of 10,594 1963 Corvette split-window coupes were produced. 

With every C1 being a convertible, the 1963-only Chevrolet Corvette Sting Ray split-window Coupe would be Corvette's first coupe. There appears to be no shortage of 1963 split-window coupes for sale, either; as of this writing, there were 20 examples of original, unmodified cars being sold between September and December 2024. According to classic.com, the value has ranged from a low of $117,500 to a high of $345,000, with most of the higher-value sales appearing to be fuel-injected models, which amounted to an estimated 1,300 out of the 10,594 split-window Coupes produced. This makes the high-performance 327 cubic-inch, 360-horsepower fuelies relatively rare, and therefore more valuable.