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I see the seasonal slowdown of sports car sales that happens every winter combined with the general appetite for the base cars we've seen over the past year. There are 115,000+ C8s out there now. Now add in the natural suppression of the market on the upper trims like a Z06 that happen as soon as a higher variant is offered. I think the base cars will take another demand hit once used Z06s are plentiful around that $90-95K mark. It will be there very soon. I'm not saying we're going to get to 20% off but I think dealers will be dropping their pants on 2026 Stingrays pretty early in the model run. The market has shown that customers don't want Stingrays at their current MSRP and now they're raising it. A new interior will move a few cars but it isn't enough to justify a $2K increase on the slow-selling base cars.
As of Feb 2025 there were 192,000 C8s produced and there is easily now more than 200K but we should get the final 2025 production numbers. For model year 2024 73% of all C8s were Stingrays and that has dropped to somewhere around 63% for model year 2025 but the bottom line is while some like to focus on the rising inventory the fact remains that the C8 still dominates the segment in total sales numbers with over 50% of the total market share. At some point every market is going to get saturated when you are producing at a rate of 3x the closest competitor.
What Corvette enthusiasts should be focusing on is the good news that C8 is still the best bargain ME sports car in the market and discounts off MSRP (even if they do go to 20 or 25% off in winter) just make it even more accessible to more buyers. This is what Corvette has always been.
I think you would have to be delusional if you think the 2026 Corvettes will be cheaper than the 2025 especially since there was no increase in price from 2024 to 2025. That would mean that the 2026 C8 will be cheaper than the 2024 C8.