When Chevrolet first revealed the C8 Corvette in 2019, it was a revelation. It offered a 495-horsepower V8 wedged behind the driver, making it the first mid-engine Corvette if you aren’t one of those, “Well, actually, it’s technically been mid-engine for a while,” nerds. Even better, for a short time, it also carried a sub-$60,000 base price, making it far more affordable than a lot of people expected. These days it starts at a little over $70,000, which still isn’t bad at all, and you can probably pick up a high-mileage used version for like half that (or maybe less), right? Wrong.
As it turns out, when you offer a mid-engine sports car with a near-500-hp V8 for far less than any of the alternatives to start with, used versions hold their value way too well. That’s also a direct attack on those of us who depend on massive depreciation to make otherwise-unaffordable performance cars attainable for us. Of course, plenty of those same people will loudly insist they would never buy a C8 because they can’t get it with a manual transmission, but come on. Don’t pretend you don’t still wish you could get a cheap C8. That’s how you help justify the (most likely absurd) cost of a manual swap.
Before Covid hit during Trump’s first term, it was pretty common for five-year-old used cars to only be worth about a third of their original price, while more desirable cars might retain as much as half their value. And yet, if you want a used C8 with a clean title, $55,000 or so is about as cheap as it gets for now.
Used C8 prices
Now, it’s entirely possible you may be able to find a sub-$50,000 C8 Corvette on your local Craigslist or Facebook Marketplace, but the cheapest one I was able to find is a 2020 Corvette Stingray 2LT in Albuquerque, New Mexico. It has 76,548 miles on it, and it’s listed for $54,950. There’s also a red 2021 Corvette Stingray 3LT in Miami for $54,990 and a blue 1LT at that same dealership for $55,990, although the 6,265 miles that the listing claims is definitely incorrect.
If you prefer something a little easier to find in the parking lot, you could always head to Hillsdale, Michigan, and pick up this 2022 Corvette Stingray 1LT with the Z51 package and Accelerate Yellow Metallic paint. It has 55,733 miles on the odometer and will cost you $55,520. But that would require you to get dangerously close to Hillsdale College, and no normal person wants that.
Heck, even totaled C8 Corvettes are still too expensive. For example, here’s a blue 2022 Corvette Stingray with 45,415 miles on it for a much more palatable $31,980, but it has a salvage title, and who even knows how much it would cost to actually fix all the damage and get it repainted. Odds are, you’re better off going with one of the more expensive but not totaled C8s listed above.
Of course, if people are still willing to pay those prices, that’s what a used C8 is worth. Dealers are in the business of selling cars, and Chevrolet built far too many of these for it to even be possible to collude to keep prices artificially high like some low-volume hypercar owners allegedly do. Sadly, for the folks who were hoping to pick up a five-year-old C8 for $30,000, though, the dream still remains very much out of reach.