With the emissions fine consumers possibly don’t know about, the buck stops … where?

NO taking the foot off the gas with the Chevrolet Silverado mega-ute and Corvette sports car.

That’s the defiant message from national distributor, General Motors Speciality Vehicles.

Unveiling the Kiwi market version of its hottest car yet, a massively powerful track-tuned ZO6 Corvette comes with insistence that insofar as the line-up goes there are “no changes to advise.”

It’s a simple but powerful local statement, chiming with the first national showing - fittingly, for brand ethos, on America’s independence day, July 4 - of the fastest, most potent Corvette ahead of showroom stock shipping here in 2024. 

The hotshot Z06 reveals as GMSV is coping with extra heat from Government legislation designed to steer punters away from just the sort of fare this outfit provides to Kiwis. 

The so ironically-named (in this instance) Clean Car Discount that’s an unavoidable penance for favouring Chevrolet’s big swigging, mainly petrol V8s is well known.

But how many brand fans are aware of the Clean Car Standard and what damage it might also yet do to the bottom line?

The Discount encourages people to buy cleaner cars. The Standard encourages the industry to deliver them. Or else?

CCD and CCS both work off C02 emissions. With CCS, vehicle importers are expected to meet CO2 targets with every vehicle registered. Like CCD, CCS gives leniency to low emissions vehicles. 

With CCD, these deliver as rebates - though far fewer now. With CCS, they take the form of carbon credits. CCS works to a complex calculation of weights and targets. But, basically, only brands with no (meaning fully electric) or very low (meaning PHEV) CO2 outputs get credits. And basically almost everything else, even some hybrids, becomes subject to fines. 

BIG fines. Tens of millions of dollars worth across the industry this year alone. The bill goes to distributors, but what happens if they cannot find all, or any, of the money in their own kitty …?

CCS fleet milestones are currently set at 145 grams per kilometre for cars and 218.3g/km for utes and will be 63.3g/87.2g respectively from 2027.

No surprise to learn the Corvette and Silverado are deep into the highest penalty category. 

What might raise eyebrows, though, is that the 6.2-litre common to both - save for the largest of the large Silverado 2500 HD, which has a 6.6-litre eight-cylinder diesel - emits less CO2 in the 5.9 metre, 2.5 tonne truck than it does in the far lighter performance car: 319g/km versus 349g/km. 

Where the special 5.5-litre flat plane V8 the ZO6 runs hard and loud with is not know. GM has yet to release that data. 

However, given it is a far more fiery engine than the 6.2 in the standard 3LT Corvette Stingray - with 500kW power versus 370kW - the chances of it being cleaner seem unlikely.

CCS penalties are set at $45 per gram of carbon dioxide multiplied by the sum of emissions above the target from every vehicle sold.

How much will GMSV cop? We’ve asked. GMSV remains mum, but an involver agrees it will be a considerable sum.

Larger than the maximum $6700 CCD impost that, as of July 1, adds at time of purchase to recommended retails of between $144,000 and $175,000 for a Silverado and between $195 and 210k for a Corvette? 

There’s no direct answer to this. Nor is it clear if the on-average $13,000 increase Silverado adopted in March included any of that loading.

Sales volume is a factor. GMSV seems to have shifted close to 400 Silverados since launch in November of 2020 and has registered 49 Corvettes since supply began 20 months ago. Not a big player.

Little being said publicly about CCS should not be a sign of unimportance. It does seem to be a concern for many brands with ICE in their veins. To date, just one brand, Subaru has openly said it will pass on a CCS cost to its customers. That was for a specific model, the turbocharged petrol Outback.

Prospect of other following suit might well depend on their status. Which comes back to how the legislation works. As much as the intent of CCS might have been to be even-handed across the industry, that’s not how it pans out.

CCS aims at distributors. To a car buyer, that might mean a brand. To the car industry, it’s something else entirely.

Some brands - Ford, Toyota, Mitsubishi, Kia, Isuzu and GMSV - represent themselves in the market. 

Others are represented by private companies. Giltrap Group is the biggest; it holds rights to all Volkswagen Group products. There are around half a dozen others, including operations representing Hyundai, Renault, Peugeot and Citroen and various other modest volume selections.

Ford, Toyota, Mitsubishi, Kia, Isuzu and GMSV are each individual distributors in their own right. So, as an example, is Giltrap Group. Which means? 

Those with multiple brands have an obvious advantage. They can use carbon credits from low emissions fare - with Giltrap Group, all those electric cars, notably the impending common platform MEB models across the Audi, VW, Skoda and Cupra brands - to offset the excesses of others. A luxury not easily afforded the single performers.

Some, and Toyota is a great example, are reshaping their model lineups to ease the pain. Others are very likely to either buy in carbon credits - you can imagine Tesla, for one, will be keen to sell - or to either suck up the CCS impost or pass it on.

GMSV has declined to share its strategy. Likely as not, what weighs into their factoring is what happens with the one other make that sells product of same lineage: RAM.

The RAM 1500 and 2500 are designed to face up to the Silverado LTZ, ZR2 and 2500 HD Premium and their CO2 counts go just as big. Logically, they should be the same situation under CCS. But, conceivably, they won’t be.

GMSV is a one horse show insofar as distributor status goes. RAM isn’t.  It belongs to Ateco. Another Ateco brand is electric car specialist BYD. 

While Ateco has yet to speak directly to its intentions under CCS, there’s common consensus with the industry that carbon credits earned by the Chinese make’s popular Atto 3 and incoming Dolphin and Seal cars will be used to offset the CCS hit on the brawny American trucks.

Proof of this will ultimately show in the stickers. If the pricing advantage Silverado has so far held erodes, or even evaporates, and RAM’s stickers remain the same, this could be why.

The impost that the ZO6 will have to cope with is not known.

However, it is expected to be considerably costlier - perhaps as much as $100k more - than the standard C8 type that has attracted 49 registrations in the past 18 months.

The schedule for ZO6 might mean it’s time as top gun could be brief  as Chevrolet has even more vicious Vettes coming - one that goes Green, the other sticking to seeing old-school red.

The one steering toward good is the groundbreaking electric-assisted e-Ray – cited as the fastest Corvette yet and also New Zealand-confirmed though with no indication of when. It comes into production in 2025.

After that, Chevrolet will roll out the biggest black heart, a new-generation ZR1, which is intended to sport a turbocharged edition of the Z06 mill, making 596kW.

Insofar as Silverado goes, Chevrolet has developed an electric edition. whether it avails in right-hand-drive from factory, as Corvette now comes, is anyone’s guess.

At present, Silverado is hardly a straight-from-factory product; the units have to be bought from the assembly line – in the United States or Mexico – then shipped to Australia. There they go to a bespoke facility in Melbourne where they are disassembled and rebuilt, a process that delivers all the requisite RHD-specific equipment and modified or newly engineered parts.  It’s the same time-consuming and expensive process for RAMs.

Back to the Z06. It’ll be taken around the country on a flag waving exercise, set to attract attention for more than being in an impossible to ignore Red Mist Metallic. Fans will want to check out how much damage the car’s exhaust re-engineering - which demands losing the signature quad exit pipes for the same dual pipe look as the 3LT, to meet  regional regs  - mute the howl they can hear from watching YouTube video of the US market types.

They’ll also check out those humorously humungous brakes. ZO6 has 370mm front and 380mm rear Brembo rotors, the fronts with six-piston callipers, compared to four-pots on the Stingray. It also wears the largest wheels ever available on a production Corvette: 20-inch forged aluminium Spider rims at the front and 21-inch at the rear.

Doubtless, there’ll be love-or-hate view expressed about the 3LZ trim treatment, which delivers a steering wheel beautified with carbon fibre, shift paddles made from carbon fibre, brown sueded microfibre on the upper interior trim, leather-wrapped interior door panels and instrument panel, as well as GT2 bucket seats with Napa leather upholstery and … yes, some more carbon fibre garnish.

And maybe they’ll talk resistance and resilience. This is a group that shows plenty of both. 

Harken back to last March. Release of updated Silverado chimed with the fuel pricing angst that triggered Government into brining the tax relief now just discontinued. Who would buy a big American truck with petrol rising beyond $3 a litre?

GMSV’s then country manager was unfazed, citing then what’s still being heard now: Some people will buy no matter how expensive the feeding habit, because they need the heavy-duty fare’s 4.5-tonne towing capacity, mainly for towing giant boats and horse floats, and have yet to see any logical alternates. 

Matt Taylor agreed there will be  a point where the cost of owning a vehicle of this size becomes too much, but added:  “The people who buy these … well, they feel it’s a matter of ‘what’s the alternative?’