Who fancies a brand new 1978 Chevrolet Corvette?

A nice shiny new ’78 350 cu in (5.7-litre) V8 Corvette coupe with a targa top, still with the plastic covering on the seats and the supplying dealer’s sticker in the window, is coming up for auction. New? It’s done 23 miles in 39 years, presumably going straight into storage after being delivered to its first owner.

Here’s a machine that sums up the expression “time warp car”. A bonus is that this third-gen C3 model is one of the two-tone Silver Anniversary Edition models produced in 1978 to mark 25 years of the Chevy coupe. Someone in ’78 obviously thought this was a “future classic” worth laying down, and they weren’t wrong.

The only problem for us, today of course, is that this 1978 car doesn’t come with 1978 prices. Thirty-nine years ago it cost US$9,750 – about £7,800 – plus a couple of hundred bucks for the two-tone paint job (the first two-tone ‘Vette since 1961). 

Today it’s going to be rather more than that…though how much more Coys, which is auctioning the car at its Techno Classica auction in Essen on April 8^th, isn’t saying. The car has no reserve price but no guide price either. 

If that doesn’t float your boat Coys will also be selling one of the first Merc 300SL Gullwings (€950,000-1.1 million), a BMW 328 roadster with the same owner for the past five decades (€700-800,000), and the world’s only Porsche 959 “Speedster”, no not an official convertible version of Porsche’s ‘80s supercar but a German body shop’s idea of one. It’s still down for getting €1.2m or more…