Early production cars exported -> promotion purpose?

[Oliver S.]

Hello,

I have a '65 Corvette VIN 194675S100048 - second day of production (I assume). The car was exported new to France according to the tag in the engine bay.
The car was officially registered in France in June 1966 - almost 2 years after production.
Now I have got some questions and maybe someone can sheld some light:
Are there any other export cars known from the first production days of a model year?
Could it be that such early export production cars were used as promotion cars in these countries? Maybe this could explain the long time between production and registartion - or ist this nothing unusual?

Regards
Oliver

[Wayne M.]

Re: Early production cars exported -> promotion purpose?

Oliver -- can't explain the long period before first registration; you'd think if it was promotional then after the order books closed on 1965 production, in preparation for the '66 model year, that GM (France ?) would have no further use for it.

I don't know whether you consider shipping new Corvettes to Canada as "export" in the same sense as overseas, but here's the early '65 production that went north.

VINs 00029, 00031, 00033, 00035, 00037. All these were shown as going to dealer # 0055, which I believe is GM Canada head office (Oshawa, Ontario ?), and not the result of a specific dealer order.

This was in the timeframe of September 2nd and 3rd, 1964. After that, none were shipped until after the strike was over, starting November 23rd, commencing with VIN 001436 [11th car produced after production resumed].

In 1967, VIN 00005 was sent north (but no GM Canada record as an import) and toured the Canadian dealerships, from east to west, ending up in Vancouver. It was sold to the public at that time [I have a photocopy of the first registration somewhere -- a friend here in Calgary bought it locally, in 1977]