General Motors is once again threatening Corvette flippers with nasty resale restrictions on its most sought-after models. The same heavy-handed warranty clause that was applied to dealer allocations of the C8 Corvette Z06 will come attached to the new, twin-turbocharged Corvette ZR1.
Hey, it’s only a world-challenging supercar packing a bespoke engine with no track record whatsoever. You’re feeling lucky, right?
Frequent Corvette news source Rick Conti shared an image of the retention policy agreement on his YouTube channel. Customers who buy or lease a new Corvette ZR1 will have to sign a piece of paper saying that if you decide to “sell, or otherwise transfer ownership” of your car within the first 12 months of delivery, you forfeit all of your warranties (bumper-to-bumper, powertrain—you name it), and relinquish all opportunities to reserve or place an order for any in-demand model in the GM portfolio.
And as was the case before, the penalty trickles down to subsequent owners. The agreement notes that as the penalized owner, it’s even your responsibility to communicate the loss of warranty coverage to anybody you sell it to.
A GM spokesperson confirmed to The Drive that both the policy itself and the document in the above video are legitimate.
If it suddenly feels like 2022 all over again, well, rest assured that you’re not crazy. GM did the exact same thing to curb flipping of some of its high-profile models when the knock-on supply effects of COVID were hitting inventories the hardest. Back then, the clause was applied to the Corvette Z06, the Cadillac Escalade-V, and the GMC Hummer EV. And while GM still has a less-restrictive, six-month “retention policy” for the Z06 and Corvette E-Ray, the ZR1 still gets branded for a year.
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