What Made Someone Pay $330,000 For A Run-Of-The-Mill C6 Corvette?

Have you ever got carried away while bidding on eBay and ended up paying far more than you planned on spending, and maybe more than the item was actually worth? Most of us have, but not to the extend of splashing $330,000 on a 13-year-old Corvette.

That’s how much someone spent at this month’s Barrett-Jackson sale in Scottsdale on the car in these pictures. It’s not the 7-liter Z06, or the crazy supercharged ZR1, or even a Grand Sport; it’s just a regular 2012 Corvette C6 coupe with the ordinary 430 hp (436 PS), 6.2-liter V8. New, they cost just over $50k and today you can buy a really nice, relatively low-mileage car for less than $30k. So what possessed someone to pay more than 10 times as much for this one?

Related: The 1,064 HP 2025 Corvette ZR1 Is A Bargain at $175,000

It’s surely all down to condition and mileage, with the latter being the most important of those factors. The digital odometer, whose LCD display looks like it’s lifted straight from a late 1970s pocket calculator, shows just 65 miles (105 km). And though the pictures are quite low-res, they’re good enough to confirm that the condition of the car perfectly matches up to that odo reading.

Opportunities to buy as-new old Corvettes with double-digit mileages are not that common, and maybe the new owner is just a C6 obsessive who simply has to have the best preserved example available. But  knowing what we know about auctions and the collector market, it’s just as likely that new owner bought it as an investment, knowing that the low mileage will always make it special.

But in other respects it’s not that special at all. The C6, which came out of the David M. Ressler Collection, has a common red and black paint and interior configuration, and though it has the optional chrome wheels (which look even cheesier now than they did in 2012) and transparent roof panel, it doesn’t have a manual transmission.

It’s a nice car, and maybe one of only a handful in existence, but $330k? I’m no C6 price expert, but I would have guessed it might go for half that at the most. There’s no point comparing it with a modern Vette like the bargain-priced $175k 2025 ZR1, because collectors don’t cross-shop like that. But we can compare the C6 result with those for other classic Corvette prices.

So here’s something to chew on: a far more special 1993 C4 ZR1, also from the Ressler collection, and with a tiny 8 miles (13 km) on the clock, sold for a pitiful $115,500 at the same Barrett-Jackson event. And Ressler’s ’95 ZR1 with 73 miles (118 km) on it made just $82,500. C4 ZR1s have been undervalued for years, but that kind of C4-C6 price difference is nuts.

H/T to u/justacheesyguy on Reddit