There’s never a dull moment when you peruse automakers' sales numbers when they’re released (done either monthly or each quarter, depending on the carmaker).
Yes, analyzing this data allows for making out trends, seeing which models are performing better than others, etc. But it also reveals oddities. Such as, for instance, sales charts that include certain models that haven’t been on the market for some time.
The Dodge Viper is a good example. Figures published by Stellantis show that one new Viper was sold between April and June. The precise details regarding the vehicle (year, version, etc.) isn’t known, but it's still amazing, because of course the last new Viper to come off an assembly line was in 2017.
This means that some versions, somewhere, are still sitting in dealers' inventories. In the case of a model like the Viper, one can only guess it’s a well-preserved car, sitting cozily inside a building. One thing's for sure, the model was sold as new.
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Cars showing up like this in new-vehicle sales reports are known in the parlance as zombie cars, and the phenomenon is not uncommon. As we previously reported, in 2020 and 2021, a total of eight Vipers were sold - four in each year.
Motor1, which spotted the Viper sale in Stellantis’ figures, also mentions the sale of a BMW i8 during the same period. In the case of this super car, five models have found takers since the beginning of the year. The BMW i8 bowed out at the end of 2019.
What will be the next sales oddities to surface? Impossible to predict, of course, but what we do know is that the market is going to throw up some other nice surprises of its kind. There are almost surely more unsold new vehicles sitting inside dealerships than we might think.