New 2020 Corvettes Nearly Sold Out With Less than 30 Available Nationwide

1. ah…human greed is still live and well in the world. Perhaps there is a special place in Hell for people who delight in taking advantage of people for their own personal gain. I’m not talking about making a REASONABLE profit on a sale, but sticking to the customer, whatever the traffic will bare, then of course laughing and bragging about it, to their friends in family. There are some people out their who have money to burn..and they will pay any price to get what they want. But there are more average “regular Joes” who have dreamed about owning a car like the C8 all their lives, and they would be able to buy it at even MSRP, but not with thousands of dollars in surcharges. Oh well, that’s the way the world is…so don’t expect any changes anytime soon.

2. During normal times, I as an average buyer, did not understand the different between a bespoke order and a Dealer’s allocation order that included general options in each of the levels of cars made, ie: LT1, 2 & 3. This model and calendar years have been anything but, “normal.” Start with a new release and add in the two “stops” in production & practices in connection with the C8 sales changed, not just a little bit, but a lot. This leads me to what bothers me this year, at least a little bit. Excluding test vehicles and pre-production and press vehicles and executive cars, etc., the regular line turned out 2700 (nominal) Vettes. The, “Build and Price,” orders were understandably long on this super car. Not only, however, did GM have Bowling Green code cars for delivery to customers/dealers/Corvette Museum deliveries; it turns out (something I didn’t remember to calculate or even know existed because of the focus on the waiting period and lines and dates. In fact people like Mike talked about the nuances of ordering options that would not lead to being placed out of the line of order (examples: Rapid Blue; convertible order). The “fly in the ointment,” was the Dealer allocation not committed to customers that went to the dealer who owned those cars or the rights to them. They then added the Dealer Markup to those cars. This might be in addition to Dealer Markup charged to a customer who ordered in good faith. While this has led to the case of the Vancouver Island case of a sale in the 45-55 K range of markup for a highly optioned LT3, it also led to this: Those with legitimate orders with deposits on file, who did not receive their cars because their car turned into this general dealer allocation which had no one’s name on it. (It is one of those cars that allowed me to score and LT2 CMGM/Z51. I bought one of those Dealer owned allocation cars, that probably should have gone to a customer who had already put money down in good faith. Yet GM did not want to deviate from, “…Past Practices.” Not a big deal during normal and non-impactful virus years and Union strikes, such allocation offered the opportunity for “browsing,” on the lot and then picking out a car that appealed to either a buyer who had planned or even a buyer who went into the dealer on impulse and couldn’t walk out of the dealership without a transaction in hand. I haven’t seen anyone write about this set of factors in exactly this fashion but I promise you, these factors also impacted those waiting in line to get their Corvette C8’s. AF

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