Lucas Bell 
The C8 Corvette has had a harder journey to market than most sports cars. Leaving aside the fact that it took nearly 50 years for Chevrolet to make mid-engine Corvette, the C8 has hit roadblock after roadblock. First the UAW Strike last October delayed the initial production of the car, and limited the available stock. Then the coronavirus pandemic slowed progress even further, as production facilities across North America closed. Despite all of this, new information appears to show that GM is on track to build 20,000 examples of the 2020 model year Corvette.
During the National Corvette Museum‘s annual Corvette Team Seminar on Friday, Product Manager Harlan Charles announced that previously built and accepted dealer orders for the 2020 Corvette totals 20,181 possible units. So far in the production run, Chevrolet has only managed to produce about 3,000 of those cars. However, GM has a plan to fulfill all of those customer orders.
In order to achieve this before the November 2nd model-year changeover, the Bowling Green factory would need to average 11.5 cars per hour, according to the team at CorvetteBlogger, who attended the seminar. This would put production totals for the first shift at 460 cars a week for the remaining 22 weeks of the model year. The second shift then would only need to be responsible for an additional 7,000 cars, requiring shifts to run for only 15 of those weeks.
Assuming there are no further delays brought on by the virus, or the related supply chain issues, this isn’t an unreasonable production request from GM. Should things stay on track, we don’t see why every 2020 Corvette that has been ordered won’t be delivered to their respective owners. It is true that this will take away from the rarity of this first year of mid-engined Vettes, but I’m sure we can all agree that this is the preferred outcome for the C8 Corvette faithful both at GM and at home.
