There are currently 9,000 unsold Corvettes waiting on dealer lots, according to a new report.

Things aren’t looking great for the Corvette right now. After having a heyday in 2014 when the latest C7 Generation went on sale, Chevy has started having trouble moving their high-performance sports car.

According to CarSalesBase.com, Chevy sold 34,839 Corvettes in 2014. That’s a goodly sum and they maintained that sales to 2016 with 29,995 sold. But last year, things seem to have taken a nosedive with just 18,791 Corvettes sold in 2018. That’s a drop of 46%.

Meanwhile, GM has done nothing to curb production and dealer inventories continue to swell with unsold ‘Vettes. CorvetteBlogger.com reports that a dealer inventory website is showing 9,000 unsold Corvettes or a roughly 232-day supply. That’s up from 8,000 unsold Corvettes last December.

So why the huge supply? Well, lack of demand is one factor, but that doesn’t explain why GM doesn’t just pump the brakes on Corvette output. CorvetteBlogger notes that dealers are still ordering Corvettes despite having them sit on their lot for over half a year because of GM’s allocation system which rewards dealers that order (and presumably sell) lots of Corvettes by giving them allocation to the next generation Corvette when it arrives.

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Introducing the 2019 Corvette Drivers Series — special-edition Grand Sport models designed in collaboration with the Corvette Racing team.
via Chevrolet

The mid-engine C8 Corvette is a highly anticipated car, and dealers very much want to have as many of them on their lots as possible. It’s likely that Chevy dealers are taking the hit on the unpopular C7 Corvette now in order to get preferential access to the C8 Corvette later.

That said, poor sales numbers aren’t great for GM. Most carmakers try to drum up interest by creating special editions of their cars or holding massive sales, but so far GM has offered precisely 2 special editions of the Corvette in the past year, and neither of them did much for sales, and GM has remained stubbornly obstinate to releasing incentives to buy a new Corvette.

But this all could just be in anticipation of the C8 making a big splash. When the C8 does arrive, you can bet that any unsold C7s will have some pretty steep discounts.

(via Autoblog)

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