Five miles on the odometer, black paint over an Adrenaline Red interior, a power-retractable carbon-fiber hardtop: that was the 2027 Chevrolet Corvette ZR1X convertible a dealer put on Bring a Trailer, and bidders took it to $441,000. The window sticker read $296,100, so the winning bid landed $144,900 above it, a premium of nearly 49 percent.
Autoblog reported the result on Oct. 7, and autoevolution had published it a day earlier, so the auction closed no later than Oct. 6.
Anatomy of the $144,900 premium
CorvSport’s pre-auction listing post on Oct. 1 describes the car as a 2027 ZR1X 3LZ convertible with five miles, black over Adrenaline Red with Jet Black accents. The options it names are a $13,000 Carbon Fiber Aero Package, $16,000 carbon-fiber wheels, the ZTK Performance Track Package, Magnetic Selective Ride Control, GT2 sport seats and a Bose system. Autoblog adds carbon-ceramic brakes and a front-axle lift system to the tally, and notes that the seller was a dealer, which it does not name. Those two carbon-fiber items alone come to $29,000 of the sticker.
Bidding ran for days, and it moved in steps that the coverage lets a reader reconstruct. Carscoops reported on Oct. 5 that offers had already passed $400,000, and autoevolution recorded a $415,000 bid on Oct. 4 before the final $441,000 offer from a bidder using the handle “Shelby 314159.” Neither outlet gives the bid count, the exact closing time is not stated in the coverage, and the listing itself could not be opened for this report, so the price and sticker rest on the two outlets that agree with each other.
Autoblog’s Prerna Malhotra framed the result carefully. Her point, as the outlet put it, is that $441,000 does not make the ZR1X a $441,000 car in a Chevrolet showroom; the figure measures how far buyers will go to own one in hand, with five miles and a factory warranty. The article finishes on how long the five-mile reading will last.
The $402,000 coupe that set the bar
The convertible is not the first ZR1X to clear $400,000. In September a Chevrolet dealer, Rydell Chevrolet of Northridge, California, sold a 2027 ZR1X coupe 3LZ ZTK for $402,000 against an original price of $290,289. That car had eight delivery miles and, according to autoevolution, came with a condition that the buyer keep it for a year without flipping it, on pain of voiding the warranty.
Set side by side, the two cars show that the convertible’s winning bid exceeded the coupe’s by $39,000 while its sticker was only about $5,800 higher. The coupe’s premium was about $111,700 over sticker, the convertible’s $144,900. Autoevolution also notes that a nearly identical Sebring Orange ZR1X had sold for $400,000 about five months earlier.
ZR1X hardware that bidders were paying for
The ZR1X pairs a twin-turbocharged 5.5-liter LT7 V8 with a front electric drive unit. Chevrolet’s own ZR1X page quotes about 1,250 combined horsepower, made up of 1,064 from the V8 and 186 from the electric motor, with a 0-60 mph time of 1.89 seconds that the brand marks as an available figure. The page lists the ZR1X from $227,800 for the 1LZ and $238,800 for the 3LZ, and shows the convertible at 4,013 pounds against 3,978 for the coupe.
The hybrid layout explains some of the fascination. Autoevolution describes a mid-mounted twin-turbo V8 driving the rear wheels, with an electric motor on the front axle fed by a 1.9 kWh liquid-cooled lithium-ion battery. Autoblog gives the combined torque as 973 lb-ft and Chevrolet’s 0-60 mph claim as 1.89 seconds, figures that rest on Chevrolet’s own claims.
Against that factory baseline, the $296,100 sticker on the car that sold sits roughly $57,300 above the 3LZ starting price, a gap the carbon-fiber aero package, the carbon-fiber wheels and the track package help fill. Autoblog calls the ZR1X the most powerful production Corvette ever built, a claim consistent with Chevrolet’s 1,250 horsepower rating, and repeats Chevrolet’s claimed quarter-mile of 8.99 seconds at 157 mph.
What the sale does not establish is a market price. Two sales in about three weeks, each of a low-mileage car listed by a dealer, are a thin sample, and both cars were essentially new. The $441,000 is the price one bidder paid on one auction, and Autoblog’s own caveat applies: it is not what the car costs in a Chevrolet showroom, where the window sticker is the starting point. On this car, that starting point was $296,100, and the bidding added almost half as much again on top of it.
This article was produced with the assistance of AI and reviewed by Morning Overview editors prior to publication.
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