I Must apologise to you all. I took the released price of $336,000 for the Australian Z06 to be the pre-Luxury Car Tax (LCT) price. This is how GMSV released prices in the beginning, back when I purchased my C8. However, when I was able to see the actual GMSV Z06 Price Press Release, this figure quoted was clearly specified by GMSV to include the LCT. The good news, in fact the very good news, is that the Z06 will cost much less than I nominated. So, let’s take another fresh look at the pricing.
The entry level Z06 in Australia will be the 3LZ specification, equivalent to the 3LT trim level of the current Stingray model. The announced price for the car is $336,000 plus on-road costs. These on-road costs will add quite a bit more to the final out-of-pocket total. So how much will a Z06 cost on the road? First you must add the cost of any options added to the base car. Options could include various premium paint colours like Amplify Orange, Accelerate Yellow, Rapid Blue or Red Mist. In other words, many of the popular colours. Options fitted could also be coloured Brake Calipers, Carbon Fibre Aero Parts, Coloured Seat Belts, Two-Tone Seats, Carbon Fibre Interior Parts, and various Exterior Stripe Packages. There are many upgrade wheels available right up to the Carbon Fibre Wheels at a really premium price. Then there is the extremely desirable Z07 Performance Package. I believe it will be almost impossible to secure a Z06 without at least a few of these options. So, let’s add a very conservative $15k selection of options to a typical purchase.
Next, there’s the Dealer Delivery Fee. We have all heard the horror stories regarding the fees charged by some dealers. Can I suggest that for a Z06 this fee could well be in the region of $20k, but let’s limit our calculation to $15k. So, we now have combined extra costs of $30k, which turns into $40k when the LCT is added. Adding this to the quoted price of $336k, we now come up with $376,000.
But this is not the end of it. There is still stamp duty, registration and third part insurance to be added. In Victoria, the Z06 is classed as a “Super luxury passenger vehicle”, because it costs over $150k. This stamp duty is 9% of the value of the car, thus bringing the price up to $409,840. Note that this tax is levied on the price including LCT, so it is a tax on a tax! Finally, there is the registration fee and TAC fee which total about $1,400. So, our grand total for the on-road cost in Victoria for a Z06 is approximately $411,000. This is an expensive car, but a lot better than the near $500,000 I previously calculated!
So, how does the value compare to that of the Stingray. If you look at the updated price for the new 2024 Corvettes, you’ll find that in the US a 3LZ Z06 ($122,600) and a US 2LT Stingray ($86,000), using as close as I can get to the Australian spec in both cases, shows the Z06 is just on 42% more expensive than the Stingray. If you do the same comparison between the prices in Australia, you’ll see that the Z06 ($336,000) is 92% more expensive than the Stingray ($175,000). If we followed the US and marked up the entry level C8 LT2 Stingray by 50%, the expected price of the Z06 in Australia would be $248,500. So the Stingray is MUCH better value.
So, what’s going on here? Why is the Z06 so expensive? Perhaps the business case to sell the Z06 in Australia for around $250k doesn’t stack-up for GM.The Z06 will obviously sell in very small numbers but the cost of managing this low number of cars in Australia will still be expensive. ie. regardless of the number of cars, there is still basically the same cost for holding spare parts and there is the same cost for dealer technical training, and dealer support, etc. The cost of supporting the Z06 will be far more expensive per car than the Stingray. This small number of cars will also need to pay their share of the overhead of keeping GMSV in business in Australia.
What is very interesting, and only time will tell, is whether this pricing strategy will work. How many Z06s do GM expect to sell? There was a rumour just a few weeks ago that only 4 cars were assigned to Australia. More recently the number of 50 has been thrown around, which would fall in line with the expectation of one Z06 per dealer. But the on-road price of over $400,000 really begs the question whether 50 buyers can be found.
I, for one, am really interested in seeing how Z06 sales go. Remember, the E-Ray costs about the same as the Z06 in the US, so how will they sell? And there are still the more expensive ZR1 and Zora models to be released in the US. So, will these also be sold in Australia at what we would expect to be extraordinary prices?