Buoyed by booming auto sales, General Motors (GM -0.17%) announced last year that it would invest $131 million in its Bowling Green, Ky., car factory, adding 250 jobs there to support production of the Corvette.
Today, GM is reportedly tapping the brakes. According to an Automotive News report, Chevrolet plans to idle the assembly plant in February for six months as it retools for the new model. The AP reports only 150 of the jobs have been added and quotes plant manager Dave Tatman as saying temporary work stoppages would amount to days, not months.
The seventh-generation Corvette is scheduled to debut Jan. 13 in Detroit.
This means the company has just about 12 weeks left to produce as many new Corvettes as it hopes to sell for most of next year. After that, GM will be placed in a curious position of spending most of 2013 ... not producing any model year 2013 Corvettes at all.
But not to worry. Already, interest in the soon-to-be-obsolete sixth-generation Corvette seems to be waning. Corvette sales through August were up a mere 1.1% in comparison to where they were at by August of last year. That's as compared to the 4.3% increase in Corvette sales GM notched in full-year 2011.
