A Chicago mechanic just paid real money for a car that looked like a campfire. The 2025 Chevrolet Corvette Z06 3LZ sold new for $155,000 a few months ago, and it rolled across a salvage auction block with melted mirrors, a missing roof panel, and soot caked into a tan interior.
The buyer, Alex Palmeri from the LegitStreetCars channel, won the bidding at $65,000 before fees pushed the total past $70,000. He had spotted one detail in the listing photos that convinced him the fire damage was not what it appeared to be.
The Z06 carried roughly 3,000 miles on its odometer and a Carfax history that raised more questions than it answered. Paint protection film (PPF) had gone on at 400 miles, the fuel filler neck was replaced at 2,600 miles, and the car was declared a total loss on July 4.
That sequence is important. General Motors issued a recall and stop-sale covering 2023 through 2026 model-year C8 Corvette Z06s and 2025 through 2026 model-year ZR1 models in North America after reports of fires during refueling. Whether the fuel filler swap and the fire are connected is still unclear, and Palmeri did not know going in.
What he noticed instead was a patch of white paint showing through what looked like melted film, a strong hint the whole car had been wrapped before it ever caught fire. He burned matching pieces of weatherstripping and PPF for comparison. Neither matched the damage he saw in the photos.
Federal rules on salvage titling, laid out in NMVTIS regulations, classify a vehicle as salvage when repair costs exceed its pre-damage value or when an insurer declares it a total loss.
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