Early August means a lot of things---there’s less than a month left before Labor Day and the traditional “end” of summer, and football training camps are open at every level of play from the pros to high-schoolers.

It also used to be the time where somewhat-strange-looking vehicles used to appear suddenly on the streets and highways around Detroit.

They were…Next Year’s Cars!

Time was, the then-current model year would start winding down as the weather heated up. June was typically when Chevy dealers would be getting their last orders for that year in to The General, and those “last chance’ cars would make up the dealer’s inventory up Until New Vehicle Introduction Time, which came in September. And those would be the newest cars anywhere.

Once the factories built and shipped their last current-year cars, the assembly plants (and many of their related supplier and sub-assembly plants) would shut down for at least two weeks of “model changeover.” That’s when the old tooling would be loaded out, along with any parts in stock that weren’t going to be used on the next year’s models. Before the new tooling and related stuff came in, any needed heavy maintenance to the plant’s works would be performed. Those plant workers not directly involved in the changeover would be on a paid vacation until the scheduled start-of-production date for the next year’s cars. Then, they’d get the word on what changes were happening for the next year, the plants would fire up again, and the assembly lines would start cranking out the nexrt year’s cars usually in early or mid-August, about six weeks before they went on sale.

In Detroit, early-production cars made their way into executive fleets in August, which started showing up on the streets and roads where those execs lived right away.

I can remember sitting out by Adams Road in Bloomfield Township, with a bunch of other neighborhood kids, spending August afternoons waiting for the new stuff to come by, which would be enthusiastically received, even if it was a grille-and-trim change on an existing body

But throw an all-new Corvette into the mix, and things could get a little bit crazy.

In Birmingham, the big downtown movie theatre would occasionally run GM factory films before the Saturday kids’ matinee. On one August Saturday in 1962, they almost wished they hadn’t. For the factory GM one-reeler they showed to a theatre filled with grade school-age kids who’d been loading up on sugar since breakfast was the one introducing the all-new Corvette Sting Ray.

The best term to describe what happened next was “critical mass.”  

Fortunately, the damage to the theatre wasn’t too bad, but the images and sounds of the New Corvette that they received ensured that any scale-model replica of a Sting Ray would get snapped up in a hurry by these potential-future-1:1 scale-Corvette-buyers (stealing a page from Pontiac’s marketing practices of the time in the process).

Anywhere else that theatre owners ran that same GM-produced short film before a kids’ matinee, much the same thing happened.

And, it’s very likely that many of those kids went on to own Corvettes.

Didn’t you?