How Chevrolet Beat Detroit in the Race to Build America's First Fuel-Injected Car

By late 1956, Detroit's horsepower war had reached a point where a bigger carburetor just didn't turn heads anymore. Three American automakers, AMC, Chrysler, and Chevrolet, were all racing to put fuel injection into a production car first. Two of them would stumble badly, with one system never reaching a single customer and another recalled and converted back to carburetors.

Only one company actually delivered injected cars into buyers' hands, and it did so more than a year ahead of anyone else. That car wore a simple fender badge: Corvette.

The first contender was AMC, which announced the Bendix Electrojector for the 1957 Rambler Rebel at a hefty $395 option. It appeared in brochures and even sat on display at the 1957 New York Auto Show, but cold-start problems meant no injected Rebels were ever delivered. Chrysler tried next, offering the same Electrojector on the 300D, DeSoto Adventurer, Dodge D-500, and Plymouth Fury starting in late 1957.

Factory records show only 54 cars took the $600 option before failing capacitors and AM-radio interference killed the program. Meanwhile, Chevrolet's Rochester Ramjet system had already been rolling off the line since November 1956.

That first fuel-injected Corvette, nicknamed the "Fuelie", used a port mechanical injection system bolted to the new 283-cubic-inch small-block V8. It produced 283 horsepower, making it the first American production engine to hit the magic one-horsepower-per-cubic-inch mark. 7 seconds and top out beyond 130 mph.

20, roughly a month's salary for the average American in 1957, and fewer than one in six Corvette buyers checked that box. Reliability was also a headache, with many owners eventually swapping the injection for a carburetor out of frustration.

The Ramjet's victory was short-lived. It disappeared from Chevrolet's passenger cars after 1959 and from the Corvette after 1965, as big-block cubic inches offered cheaper horsepower. But the losing Electrojector system had a surprising afterlife: its patents were sold to Bosch, which developed them into the D-Jetronic system introduced in 1967, the direct ancestor of the electronic fuel injection found in virtually every car on the road today.

Mechanical injection got there first, but electronic injection got there forever. And the 1957 Corvette Fuelie still owns the title as America's first production fuel-injected car, with top examples now fetching over $170,000 at auction.