Customers are beating down Chevy dealers’ doors, checkbooks at the ready, itching for a new Corvette Stingray like Badger and Skinny Pete ache for Heisenberg’s Blue Sky, but Chevrolet isn’t about to add a second shift at the sports car’s dedicated production facility in Bowling Green, Kentucky, to accommodate the overwhelming demand. Right now, the production line—which went through a $131-million retooling for the C7—is assembling 140 Corvettes a day. There is a second phase to production capacity, which will be 160 units daily, but that’ll be the limit
Corvette chief engineer, Tadge Juechter, told Automotive News, “We’ve seen this again and again. You bring in a new Corvette and the demand is sky-high at the beginning and then tapers off.” Considering there are about 1000 workers on that one shift, it would be no small investment to add a second. The shortage of C7s is expected to last until next spring. Present plans call for some 30,000 C7s to be built each year to supply the U.S. and the other markets in which Chevrolet participates. While the automaker sells in some 140 countries, not all will get the C7.
- Comparison Test: 2013 SRT Viper GTS vs. 2013 Chevrolet Corvette ZR1
- Instrumented Test: 2013 Chevrolet Corvette 427 Convertible
- Comparison Test: 2013 Chevrolet Camaro ZL1 vs. 2012 BMW M6 Convertible
If you’re tired of waiting, try your SRT dealer. Vipers are selling so slowly—just 426 units have been delivered to customers this year—that SRT is trimming production by a third. (For comparison’s sake, that means that 134 more Corvettes will be born into this world every day than are Vipers.) Some of the disparity can be attributed to the fact that the Viper is sold outside the U.S. in very limited numbers.
Source: CarAndDriver
No comments:
Post a Comment