Corvette Owner Comes Up With A DIY ‘Stealth Mode’ Just To Keep Neighbors Happy

Though it’s hard to believe, not everyone loves the sound of a V8 performing a cold start before breakfast. Larry Lee’s neighbors certainly don’t which led the inventive Corvette owner to create his own method of quieting the LT2 V8 first thing in the morning when he leaves the house.

The new 2024 Corvette E-Ray hybrid has its own solution to this problem and it’s called Stealth Mode. While the E-Ray isn’t designed to run for extended periods on electric power alone, it does have enough juice in the battery to let you creep away from your street purely on electric power before the V8 kicks in.

But Lee’s Corvette is a standard V8-powered C8, meaning he had to think of another answer. Moving house was one option, giving his neighbors the finger every time they complained would have been another. But the conscientious Corvette fan instead decided to spend $400 creating two additional sections of exhaust, one for each side.

Each of the new exhaust sections has two pipes that slot into the car’s original exhaust tailpipes, those new pipes leading to a single cylindrical silencer and one rather plain-looking outlet pipe. The sections seem to slot in easily enough and there are no complicated camps to tighten, but they look incredibly dumb, like a bad DIY attempt to replicate those hilarious bosozoku custom cars out of Japan.

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Fortunately, they’re not a permanent fixture. Lee says he stores the additional pipes in the C8’s trunk, slotting them in when he wants to leave the house, then stopping further down the road to remove the sections and store them back in the trunk.

So after going to all that trouble and ruining the looks of his C8, does the weird mod even work? Lee starts the Chevy up to show us and we’ll admit we were slightly underwhelmed at first. The 5.5-liter V8 still sounded really loud leading us to wonder exactly how much happier the hack would make his neighbors. But then he performs a second cold start without the pipes in and, oh my, we’d forgotten how meaty that pushrod V8 sounds before it’s warmed through.

We were going to reach out to Lee to find out if he had any plans to beautify the system, maybe with some chrome trim, but his wife said he was busy mopping his neighbors’ floors, cutting their lawns, and picking their kids up from school so wouldn’t have time to respond.

Do you love your neighbors enough to make this kind of mod for your noisy car?

H/T to Corvette Forum