Years ago, when I had first heard that Chevrolet was doing research and design to turn their iconic sports car, the Corvette, into a mid-engine roadster, I couldn’t be more excited. The Chevy Corvette was one of the first cars that I ever loved, and I share some of my fondest memories of riding shotgun in the passenger seat of my mother’s C5. Part of what made the new Corvette so exciting was that Chevy aimed to maintain one of the car’s most important facets: the affordable price. Unfortunately, despite the manufacturer’s attempts, things haven’t quite worked out that way.

The not-so-affordable everyman’s car

Corona Virus, factory strikes, and other factors have made the C8 a highly demanded and hard to find car. You know what, that means the price goes up from here. We might love the new mid-engine sports car, but the demand spiking overproduction has ruined that important feature: it is no longer affordable.

A spike in prices

In fact, you’d be hard-pressed to even find one for sale, and you’d probably have better luck finding one for sale on the used-car market from someone who has already owned one. Because they are so rare, and so many people want them, you can find them for upwards of $100k just for the base model. That’s pretty heartbreaking, but more importantly, it ruins one of the most important parts of Corvette heritage: it is no longer the everyman’s car.

Hope for the future

At this point, Chevrolet themselves has not increased the price of the car, so if you do some research, you will find that the MSRP is still hovering around the original $60,000 starting price. The crisis lies in the hands of current owners, who are some of the only individuals with true access to the car. With production far under what it was intended, it isn’t easy to find a new Corvette for sale even straight from the dealership, and there is a good chance you can’t even custom order one.

With the popularity of the Corvette staying steady, we are confident that Chevrolet will be producing more in the next model year, hopefully with plentiful numbers to help keep the cost where it was originally intended to be. As more of the new mid-engine roadsters go into production and hit the streets and dealership lots, the price for the base model will return to at least hover near an affordable sticker price, once again making it the affordable sports car it was intended to be.