Selection & Purchase
1957 - 1962 Corvette's have always had a certain appeal to me but till about two years ago the love for these cars wasn't really surfacing. This changed when we had to select a car for our wedding. We received the brochure of Meijers car rental company who are offering a broad selection of classic and sport cars (e.g. Ferrari's, Lamborurgini's, Frod Mustangs and Rolls Royce's). Since both my wife and I are classic car lovers the choice for a classic car was easily made. When I was leafing through their brochure their Corvette 59 was immediately drawing my attention. After a short consult with my wife to be the decision was made: their Cascade Green 1959 Corvette with red leader interior, black soft top and automatic shifter would be our wedding car ! Obviously we have drawn a lot of attention during our wedding day when we drove through the country side...
The months after our wedding day was a very busy period. We had just moved from our own houses to live together in a beautiful small village called Limmen (near Alkmaar). But in May '03 the Corvette fever was slowly starting to itch and, just out of curiosity, I was browsing the web to see if any Corvette were offered for sale. This small, innocent investigation was rapidly changing into a serious selection process when I found out that there was a moderate market for these kind of cars. Soon I decided I favored the 1958 - 1960 types of Corvette, especially the '59 or '60 version since I didn't like the additional chrome on the truck on the '58 version.
Our investigation often started at the sites: www.1958corvette.com, www.1959corvette.com and www.1960corvette.com. titlehough I think these sides don't show you an overview of cars which are currently for sale, they do give a good overview of companies selling C1 Corvette's. E.g. the amount of cars offered by ProTeam was impressive but quite pricy (probably because they sell a lot of class 1 and 2 cars). These car were a bit to costly for our budget so I've continued my search with other companies to find something fitting our budget...
Eventually we found a possible candidate offered by GMDownUnder in Santa Ana, California. Here our dream car was offered, but buying a car via internet, without even been able to see it in real life or driving it was a bit to risky. What did we have to do ?
Luckily my wife works for the Dutch branch car repair organization, called FOCWA and therefore she has a lot of contacts in the restoration business. One of them was able to help us finding someone in California who has classic car restoration as a profession which was willing to help us to go check the car and make a test drive with it. He created a report for us with all his findings on the car. With this report we started the negotiations with GMDownUnder to get a few bits fixed or improved.
titleogether quite a list so it was tricky to decide if would would really dare to buy the car. Some items on the list were known issues (deducted by studying the pictures on the site of GMDownUnder), some were normal usage (the car is 44 years old) and if the car was in a mint condition with matching number engine I probably couldn't afford it anyway. During the countless telephone calls we agreed that the items marked with a star were suppose to be fixed/repaired by GMDownUnder because the needed material should be cheaper in the States then flying them in after transporting the car to the Netherlands.
Negotiations by phone are tricky. The non-verbal communication is not visible and the 9 hours time differents with the States doesn't help either. One way or the other we made a deal and agreed with the terms and conditions. As a bonus GMDownUnder renewed the carpets and door panels since these were not in a original state. Since we were going to export the car we didn't have to pay the US sales tax and therefore we could buy the car for $ 35.000 (excl. Dutch sales tax (= 6%, because the car is older than 30 years)).
From then onwards it was a question of timing. The dollar was fluctuating a lot on the exchange market, varying from € 1.10 - € 1.16 and each dollar-cent higher was € 350 price reduction, worth while since a countless list of needed parts was foreseen! When the dollar hit € 1.15 we decided to get the needed $ 35k. Via the post and fax the paperwork was done and soon we received the title of our new old-timer.
Next step in our new project was getting a reliable shipper to collect the car and ship in, in a container, to the Rotterdam harbor. The cost to get this done was reasonable, app. € 1.300 and 1.15 % of the car price for the needed insurance. Then the most difficult part started: waiting. It took more than a month to ship the car all the way to the warehouse of moving company Dijkshoorn in Vlaardingen...
