2020 Corvette Production Start Slides to February with Convertibles Starting in 2nd Quarter

It’s been a bit of a rollercoaster since Chevrolet first starting accepting orders in September for the 2020 Corvette Stingray Coupe.

After the first order consensus in September, Chevrolet scheduled the first wave of retail production to begin in early December. But then came the nearly 6-week long UAW strike which shut everything down. As the strike was ongoing, the Target Production Weeks (TPW) for those early builds were pushed back into mid-to-late January.

Once the strike ended, we were hoping for some positive news about the TPWs as they all disappeared from the GM Order System late last week. But then they came back and we are finding out that retail production of the 2020 Corvettes will most likely start on February 3rd.

We do not have official confirmation on this, but that’s what we are hearing from our dealers as well as customers with current TPWs. I have seen a TPW posted on the Corvette Forum that indicated a 1/27 start and that could also be possible depending on when Chevrolet does a run of CTF cars for marketing and other purposes.

Chevrolet does have a graduated roll-out planned for the C8 Corvette which we’ve also talked about previously. Originally the plan was to build 2LT and 3LT cars first (with certain options and colors) and then begin to add additional colors and options until all models, colors and options were available. The 1LTs were originally scheduled to begin 10 weeks after the start of production but included in that original 10 week period was the two-week Christmas/New Years shutdown, and so we estimate the 1LTs will most likely start in early April.

And then that brings us to the Convertibles which were originally supposed to start in February. Our best guess is that the start of production for the Convertible Stingrays would also begin sometime in mid-to-late April or even early May as well.

During the strike, the order consensus for October which was supposed to cover weeks 3-5 of production was canceled. The next order consensus for the 2020 Corvettes will pick back up this month. When that happens, we’ll have a constraint report to bring everyone back up to date.