[POLL] Corvettes for Sale: Battle of the Browns!

Brown isn’t exactly a color that comes immediately to mind when thinking about America’s Sports Car. In fact, after popping up here and there in C3 and early C4 order guides, UPS’ preferred hue was kept far away from Chevrolet’s performance icon. Then, in 2020, a strange thing happened: the long-awaited and radically different mid-engine Corvette suddenly embraced its ‘outer’ brunette. Each of the first four years after its engine relocation surgery, the C8 configurator featured a shade of brown – and, even as it finished dead last in the annual approval ratings that are model year ordering, it soldiered on until 2024 when it was finally put out to pasture in favor of the equally misunderstood but less resilient “Cacti.”

The C8’s freshman and sophomore campaigns hid their brown behind a fancy-sounding Zeus Bronze moniker, to no avail. A measly 548 units made it out of Bowling Green in 2020, followed by just 509 for ’21. In both years, the only other color that earned under 1,000 orders was the curious Accelerate Yellow, which still outpaced ZB 3-to-2 with 1,578 total builds spread out 688/890 between ’20 and ’21. But is it possible that we all owe the paint of the chief Greek deity an apology for overlooking it through back-to-back trips around the sun? Your author certainly felt that way when this one-owner slice of the original 548 flashed across my Cars.com feed. It’s combination of perfectly-fried golden brown with twin Carbon Flash stripes over a complementary two-tone Black and Natural Napa leather had my thumb reaching for the site’s trademark purple “heart” button, and, as Tom Scholz so eloquently put it in 1976, It’s Been Such a Long Time since this stick-shift and Z-badge snob had done that for a 2020. The car that inspired that move is simply stunning, and with just 3,522 miles on the clock, it has held its value exceptionally well, with a current ask of $76,998.

The Grecian version of Jupiter bowed out after its two years in the sun and was replaced in 2022 by an even browner shade of brown that attempted to play off of the public’s love of coffee with the name “Caffeine” Metallic. Just like its predecessor, that tactic fell on deaf ears – actually, that isn’t fair to the Bronze because the brown bloodbath was even worse the second time around. Out of 25,831 Corvettes that found new homes in 2022, a scant 385 of those customers opted to have theirs painted the new brown. In 2023, that number grew by 40% to 536 units, which sounds good at face value, but that’s a deceptive and very EV-y way of representing the data because when you zoom out to look at the bigger picture, Corvette production as a whole was up more than 50% to 53,785 in 2023. This landed overall interest in brown paint at .99%, down from the 1.5% of ’22. Unsurprisingly, even among these rarest of C8s, the award for hardest Caffeine ‘Vette to find goes to the new for-2023 Z06. Just ten coupe buyers and an equal serving of hard-top convertible owners were brave enough to select from the caboose of the popularity train when spec’ing their first-year flat-plane babies. So, imagine my surprise when one of those 10 convertibles showed its angry face on eBay just a couple of days after I was wowed by the Zeus Bronze ’20. The car in question resides in Minnesota and also boasts a single owner on its respective Carfax. It has traveled further (6,274 miles) than its counterpart in this article, but it goes all Shrek on us by piling a few extra layers of rarity on top of its severely limited paint and Z06 prominence. Of the 50k+ ‘Vettes assembled in ’23, just 6,413 were Zs, and just 3,304 of those were convertibles as this one is. It also adds the top-of-the-line 3LZ equipment group with the perfect Natural leather interior color (one of 4,806 total and just 188 droptop Zs) and the hard-core Z07 track pack (one of just 1,845 Zs to receive this highly-desirable option in ’23). To top it all off, this is one of just 128 inaugural-year Z06s ordered with RPO 5DK: Tech Bronze wheels! You don’t have to go out on a limb to imagine this as a true 1-of-1 Corvette. While it won’t be found next to its 82k-mile sibling in the bargain bin, at $145,000, we can, surprisingly, count it among the better deals we’ve seen on a Z07.

We want to close by going back to brown. These are both incredible cars, but putting aside all of the other options and just focusing on the unique hues of the respective paints, we want to take the temperature of Corvette Nation once again. So, which C8 Brown do you personally like the most in hindsight? As always, thanks for reading and playing along!

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Source:
McLoughlinChevy.com and cornerstonechevroletstillwater.com

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