My pal Mark stopped by the house the other night. Fourteen years ago, we said goodbye to street racing together. Then we bought a race car together, a Neon ACR with an SCCA regional championship in the logbook and a well-documented history dating back to Dodge's celebrity "Challenge" events. We drove two heavy-duty trucks and three people thirteen hundred miles over the course of a full day to pick up the car and a spare shell. I planned the purchase, and the trip, for almost a month. I handled everything from the truck rentals to the meals. When we got there, I found out that Mark had forgotten to bring his half of the purchase price. The envelope with the cash on it was still sitting on his kitchen counter. He can be absent-minded like that.

Like a lot of absent-minded people, however, Mark is a brilliant, perceptive individual who now operates a profitable side business buying, selling, and trading unique sports cars. In the past year he's moved everything from a Ferrari 355 to a rusty BMW M Roadster to a 964 Turbo formerly owned by Saudi royals. When I told him about my wife's recent acquisition of a pumped-up C5 Corvette coupe, Mark's eyes crinkled a bit. "Oh, the C5 Corvette," he laughed. "That's the car that doesn't get driven… or sold… or bought." Naturally, and with a bit of disbelief in my voice since I'd just observed all three of these things happen, I asked him to explain.

"The C5," Mark told me, "has the widest bid-ask spread in the business." Luckily for me I recognized that phrase from my occasional dabbles into coin collecting: to (over)simplify, it's the difference between the highest price anybody will offer for an asset and the lowest price that anybody will accept for it at a given time.

Chevrolet

Most cars don't have much of a bid-ask spread at all. As a former car salesman and captive-finance employee, I can tell you that people might gripe about what a dealership offers them in trade, but it's only a deal-killer when the buyer is so "upside-down" in a car that not even the most creative financing strategies can cover the gap between what they owe and what it's worth. As a rule of thumb, buyers who don't owe much on their trade-ins will accept pretty much anything you offer them. After all, they don't want their old car. If they did, they wouldn't be in a showroom looking at a new one.

That's how the market for "normal" vehicles works. Corvettes (and Ferraris, and Porsches that aren't trucks) are different. To begin with, they're typically occasional-use cars. When the owner replaces them, it's a matter of whim, not necessity. The single mother whose old minivan is smoking on startup isn't in a position to quibble about the details of a deal; a sixty-year-old retiree with a comfortable income has nothing else to do but quibble.

That's not always the case; a lot of sports cars hit the market hard during the economic collapse of 2008, for example. Nor can you discount the influence of external factors. Matt Farah cut my wife quite a deal on her 'Vette because he wanted to free up a parking space in his garage for his girlfriend's car. In general, however, your Corvette seller is not "motivated," and that goes double for C5 (and early C6) Corvettes because most of them are long since paid off.

Jack Baruth

Of course, the same is true for 993-generation Porsches and many other prestige or sports cars. What's unique about the C5 Vette, according to my pal Mark, is that virtually all of them have under 30,000 miles, even after fifteen to twenty years. Corvette owners are notorious for waxing their cars more often than they drive them. So there are a lot of C5s out there in like-new condition. One careful owner, low mileage, no stories, no excuses.

A 1998 Carrera 2S in that condition is worth more than the original sticker price, because the majority of air-cooled Porsches have been driven 100,000 miles or more. But with a Corvette, the combination of low mileage and unmolested paint isn't a unique selling point. It's just business as usual.

This isn't something you can explain to a C5 owner without making him angry. He knows perfectly well that most cars out there aren't babied like his 'Vette—he has eyes! He's out there on the road every day, behind the wheel of his Denali or Lexus, seeing just how beat-up and worn-out the average fifteen-year-old car is! And he also knows how to take care of a Corvette better than anybody else! He's used the same kind of wax since he drove the car off the trailer in front of the dealer! You can't tell him that there are a hundred thousand other people out there who did the same thing!

According to Mark, the typical scenario goes like this: Mr. Jones decides to buy himself a new Corvette to replace his 2002 Z06. He goes to the dealer. They agree to his price on the new car but won't offer him a penny over fourteen grand for his old one. He's furious, but he wants a new C7 Z06. So he goes ahead and buys it. Still, he's not going to let some dealer rip him off on his hand-rubbed never-seen-rain baby. So he keeps his current Corvette as well, intending to sell it privately. But nobody wants to pay the "fair" price on Craigslist or Corvetteforum. So it gathers dust in the corner of his garage.

Chevrolet

And that's how the C5 Corvette became the car that nobody drives, nobody sells, and nobody buys. And that's how the situation will stay until something changes in the market. What that change will be, I can't say. The car might experience a resale-value renaissance similar to the air-cooled bump that has turned old 911SCs from unsellable buy-here-pay-here lot trash to mid-five-figure auction darlings. Don't count on that.

A far more likely scenario is that C5 owners start dying or going to nursing homes in significant numbers some time in the next decade, leaving their cars to Gen-X city-dwellers who don't know what to do with Dad's diaper-rubbed '98 automatic-transmission convertible. At that point, the bid-ask spread is going to shrink dramatically, in the buyers' favor.

What's a would-be Corvette owner to do while he waits for the market to come to its senses? Mark thinks that there's some money to be made in those rusty Z3-based M Roadsters. "Coupes are already through the roof," he notes. "The convertibles have to be next." Maybe it's a smart play to buy a couple of Z3Ms and wait a decade, at which point you can sell them for enough cold cash to buy a fleet's worth of Z06/Z16 Anniversary Specials. That's why Mark is driving a Z3M himself at the moment. But mark my words: when he sees Danger Girl's C5 in the mirrors, he'd better move over. The laws of supply and demand might favor the American Bavarian, but the laws of physics are firmly on the side of the plastic fantastic supercar from Kentucky.

Born in Brooklyn but banished to Ohio, Jack Baruth has won races on four different kinds of bicycles and in seven different kinds of cars. Everything he writes should probably come with a trigger warning. His column, Avoidable Contact, runs twice a week.

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