Car depreciation can be a bitch, unless you’re a buyer of course. So come with us as we take appreciation in depreciation and check out the C4 Corvette, a car that could now be yours for just £11k!
It’s easy to knock American sports cars, when viewing them from a European perspective. There’s a general feeling that cars in the US aren’t designed for corners; that they sacrifice chassis poise and handling finesse for the quasi-solution of just shoving a massive V8 in there.
For this reason, C4 Corvette owners allow themselves a wry smile, letting everyone believe their cars are rubbish before unexpectedly leaving them in their dust.
You see, Corvettes are actually awesome. Ever since their inception in 1953, they’ve always been made of fibreglass or plastic composites, meaning they’re relatively light, and the C4 generation (1984-96) was genuinely excellent.
It had all-independent suspension, huge brakes with aluminium calipers, and even featured a transverse fibreglass mono-leaf spring at the front in place of traditional coils; this was a third of the weight of steel springs while also acting as an anti-roll bar.
See, this wasn’t just dumb muscle-car grunt – this was an intelligent and holistic effort to build a capable sports car. Launch models had 205bhp, but the power steadily climbed over its production run, with run-out 1996 cars having 330bhp. (And the super-rare Lotus-developed ZR-1 had 375bhp!)
Prices for a decent C4 start around £11,000 today which, given that this was the equivalent of a £50k car in the mid-nineties, is a pretty bargainous way to prove people wrong on your favourite local race track or country lane.
