UPDATED TO ADD: Well, that took two seconds. Thank you to my Twitter list, namely Wedschilde, for identifying the car as a Spyker. I had never heard of them, but that is definitely the same car. Oh, and what I thought was C8 Corvette? I think it was really C8 Laviolette. Yes, it was dark. And the last four letters are the same.
So, between Amazonian tennis-addicted blondes, hyper-obsessive laptop-users in search of a wall socket at Starbucks, and cab drivers who enjoy accelerating from 0 to 60 in under three seconds on the shoulder of a traffic-heavy freeway, it’s been a busy week. I’ve got a lot to blog about, but haven’t had much time to do so—and I’ll be honest, I tend to fuss over what I should write in these things until I reach the point where I just throw up my hands and shoot from the hip.
Like tonight. I need some vehicular assistance, people—because there’s a mystery car parked outside that I got some drool on, and I need to know more about this bad boy.
If you enlarge the top photo, there seems to be a ‘C8 Corvette’ written on the side of the car—which, when I do a superficial search on the internet—doesn’t turn up much but strange jokes. Which also tells me that there may be no such thing as a C8 sweet ‘vette. Now, perhaps my eyes are bad and I’m reading the identifier wrong, and this is another car entirely. Or someone had this car created from scratch and created a unique non-Corvette approved C8 logo as part of the design. Either way, there’s a fat cat in the neighborhood who has a really special car on his hands.
This is not that unusual in China. The rich are phenomenally rich, and the poor are devastatingly poor—but this is also a country that breeds success in unexpected places, and folks who started out with hardly two yuan to rub together have also become part of this stratosphere of wealth—built from the ground up. I see crazy numbers of entrepreneurs crammed together, from the girls down the road who started a high-end car washing service in an alley, to the men near them who borrow/lease/buy cars to use as shadow cabs (I’ve got some sketchy stories about that, by the way, because those dudes are ruthless and there’s a part of town where it has practically turned into a street war between them and metered cabs).
Anyway, I digress. I need information on that car in the photos. Plain speculation would be enough. Give me a name, a possibility. Corvette or no?
NOTE: This car looks SO much better in real life. The pictures are kind of blah, I admit.