I received an email last night from Chevy advising me I could configure my own new 2020 Corvette online with their website. Hmmmm, that sounded interesting. The new Corvettes are mid-engined, like a Ferrari and some of world’s other exotic sports cars. After doing as Chevy suggested, I’m mighty tempted. The new Corvette is stunning.
I guess I first got the Corvette bug back in the early 1960s, watching a couple of TV shows. One was Route 66, a story about a young Marty Milner and George Maharis (Todd and Buzz) bopping around the US in a Corvette solving the world’s problems. The other was Bonanza, the great western sponsored by Chevy. We watched it as much for the Corvette ads as we did for the show. Ben, Hoss, Adam, and Little Joe. They’re all dead now, I think, but I remember them well, and Adam (Pernell Roberts) even appeared in one of the Corvette ads.
I’d wanted a Corvette ever since I was a kid, and in 2004, as Chevy was transitioning from the C-whatever body style to the C+1 body style, they allowed the dealers to sell the ’04 models to GM employees at the GM employee discount. It’s a long story how I qualified for it, but the bottom line is the discount exceeded $17K on a Z06 (a car most folks pay over MSRP for), and I was in.
To make a long story a little less long, I kept the Z06 for 14 years, and when I sold it, the car had a whopping 40,000 miles on the clock. That’s about 2850 miles annually, and when you consider insurance and registration, that worked out to something slightly south of a dollar a mile just for insurance and registration. Throw in our California fuel costs (currently well over $4 a gallon), depreciation, and maintenance (surprisingly little on a car like the Z06), firing up that silver streak was expensive. I should have driven it more to get my money’s worth, but the Corvette was more of a toy for me than real transportation. I loved the thing, but it wasn’t a good daily driver. I didn’t regret seeing the Corvette go, but every once in awhile I think about another one. Like when I received the email from Chevy last night that led to me playing around with their online configurator. That pastel blue one you see above sure grabbed my attention. There’s no denying it: The new Corvette is an incredibly-beautiful car. And I still qualify for the employee discount. But nah, I don’t think I’ll be pulling the trigger on this one.