‘Tis The Season To Lowball Corvette Owners Afraid Of The Winter

It’s that time of year again, when we can get together for the holidays and say what we’re all thankful for: turkey, time with your family, that holiday bonus, and, of course, low-balling Corvette owners every day like its your job until one of those shmucks bites.

Seems a little cold-hearted maybe, but here are the facts: sports cars aren’t driven much in the winter in large swathes of this country, and Corvettes are one of the most popular sports cars in America. Law of syllogism, one plus one equals two, Corvettes are just parked every winter, collecting dust and opening the door to cheap listings.

Don’t believe me? Check it out:

Here’s a clean C5 coupe in Lancaster, SC, coming at you for $14,000 from an initial listing of $19.5k.

Do you dig a C3 with four on the floor? Myrtle Beach has it for you with a four grand discount. 

More C5s! Five thousand off from $15,000 to just $10k.

And if you wanna try to be nearly as cool as me, the resident Autopian C6 Corvette owner (good luck with that, btw), here’s a C6 for $2k off in Jackson, Michigan.

And this is only a small handful of examples across generations. 

Is This A Real Thing?

Bring-a-Trailer’s trend charts show a slight decline on the site’s frequently inflated car prices, but it seems especially evident for the C4-C6 generations when looking at this year’s trends. Side note, it is interesting to see the C8 market crater, agnostic of the season, as we’ve remarked before.

CORVETTE C6

Here’s the chart for the C6, with the last two columns showing how the C6 faired in 2024. Yeah, there’s a couple big ticket items, but those are almost all pristine ZR1s (and one kinda awesome C1 conversion?)

CORVETTE C5

The C5 feels pretty similar to the C6, with a slight decline going across the first and back half of 2024. Those outliers are once again the retro C1 body kits which we clearly need to talk about another time.

CORVETTE C4

The C4 had a much more scattershot distribution for most of the last two years they’ve been on sale, but this second half of 2024 sees them really congregating around the mid-teens.

It looks like as soon as Ned Stark rears his head and utters those three famous words, you know that deals for the Corvette are about to pour in.

Why do the prices seem to drop in winter? Well, I’ll let the people tell you.

Sports cars are great because you get to look rad and go fast as hell, and that’s just hard to do when the water and snow is pouring from on high and making the roads slippery as hell

One of the many reasons I love my C6 is because it’s a targa, and quickly popping the top off and having the wind in my luscious hair and basking my blemish free, carmel skin in the sun is amazing, but that just isn’t an option when the air is -10 with windchill and the snow is ready to break my traction. So what do people do?

They put baby in the corner, parking ’em in storage and letting it sit, eventually getting mad that their toy is never used and selling it for pennies on the dollar.

I’m from Arizona, now in the City of Angels, which are two places notorious for having pretty much permanent shorts weather and nary a drop of water from the sky, so I had no idea that this was a thing.

The thought of throwing my car in a garage for maybe half a year is so foreign to this freak who daily drives his ‘Vette, but alas, the world doesn’t revolve around me, and somehow my experience isn’t universal. Who would’ve thought!?!

That being said, even in the Great Los Angeles with all of our pretty weather, we’re seeing prices drop, too.

Small or large, you can bet on a slash for a hot single Corvette in your area. And just look at how extreme some of these deals get!

On second thought, maybe those initial prices were a typo…

 

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Nevertheless! Do your civic duty this holiday season and message a kind man in jorts and a pair of New Balances offering $3k under his asking price and laugh your way to the bank and the gas station. You simply can’t lose.