Chevrolet or Chevy, take your pick. It’s a preference thing and not everyone would say one over the other unless it fits within the sentence. There are obvious examples of this but I won’t dive into all the specific examples other than to suggest you decide which ones work and which do not. This was a marketing decision made at the top of a global corporation, and it really doesn’t matter to them if you use either one over the other.
Chevy is just using this as a way to streamline a decision making process that likely eats up a lot of their marketing resources. Should they use Chevy or Chevrolet on those print ads, how about the emails to new customers, or any other marketing material they may produce.
It may also be that the name Chevy is a bit more casual and relaxed than they want the experience to be when being introduced to their lineup for the first time. Its an image that they appreciate and embrace, but it’s also a feeling of what someone is actually buying should represent very distinctly the brand and quality of a standard and legacy of the Chevrolet products.
According to Alan Batey, Chevy is their nickname, and they want people to continue to use the name but because of their growth into these worldwide markets they want people to associate their products with one uniform brand name and that is Chevrolet. I’m sure this may have been a bit overrated in terms of a good story to break from GM’s media department because in the end its the product and features of that product that make the meaning here.
Take Corvette, and think whether or not it’s important to prefix that with either Chevy or Chevrolet, there is no reason to. The brand is as much it’s own entity as Chevrolet is to GM.
If you were to do research into these words even further, you can find definitive results that indicate which ways people prefer to use them in their online search.
And if you look at the way people use search engines, Chevy is by far the winner because thats just how people have become accustomed to searching for the models they want.