General Motors is adding a second shift and more than 400 hourly jobs at its Bowling Green (Kentucky) Assembly plant in preparation for the C8 Corvette.
The new Corvette is the best ever — and no one wants one.
Well, perhaps not no one, but with the news confirming that the eighth-generation, mid-engine ’Vette is due to arrive later this year, sale of the America’s sports car are fading even faster than they have for the past few years.
Corvette sales hit their high-water mark at about 37,000 in the U.S. in 2006.
Sales of the speedster in the U.S. have fallen each quarter since 2016. In 2018, the company sold 18,791 Corvettes, which is 44% less than in 2015. With folks waiting the for the eighth-gen models, the current versions are sitting in ever-growing numbers on dealership lots.
(GM to reveal mid-engine Corvette in July. Click Here for the story.)
Fans are waiting on the new C8, slowing sales of the new current-generation Corvette.
When big sellers sit, dealers look to find ways to make them move, and the current Corvette Stingray is getting up to $15,000 in discounts. In short, if you wanted a Corvette and weren’t worried about the mid-engine version, now is the time to jump.
In the meantime, those lusting for the long-awaited C8 version can – and are – waiting. “We’ve been taking deposits for a rumored mid-engine Corvette since 2014,” Sean McCann, floor manager at Stingray Chevrolet near Tampa, Florida, told Bloomberg.
“People are canceling their orders (on 2019s) and starting to hold back, because they want to wait and see what’s going to come out.”
(Caught! Click Here to check out these pics of a fleet of C8s caught testing in a snowstorm.)
Overall, in the U.S. sports car sales are trailing the rest of the industry. In an SUV-crazed era, sales have falling 22% in the past three years, Bloomberg notes. This is in spite of Dodge rolling out new version fo the Challenger that are wider and more powerful every six months, and the public seemingly gobbling them all up.
The move of the C8 Corvette to the mid-engine realm changes to the segment. The current front-engine model is about as fast as it can be, GM engineers have noted. It’s not going to handle must better either without the shift to the middle, so to speak.
Specifics are scarce, but for the two most important details. His tweet declared it “The Next Generation Corvette,” and announced that the C8 will make its official debut on July 18, 2019. There has long been speculation that the C8 would carry the official name, Zora, in honor of Zora Arkus-Duntov, the man commonly known as the “father of the Corvette.”
(Dodge looking at possible hybrid Hellcat. Click Here for more.)
More likely, that will be the name of the top-performing version that is expected to follow the same route we’re seeing such European stalwarts as Ferrari and McLaren follow, opting to pair a Formula One-style electric motor on the front axle with a twin-turbo V-8. If that proves accurate it could mark the first-ever production GM factory-built product to top 1,000 – and it would deliver power through all four wheels, a Corvette first.