Corvette Summer

In a time of skyrocketing gasoline prices, a high-performance sports car with a supercharged engine sounds like a tough sell.

Not for Henderson Chevrolet salesman "Corvette Mike" Long.

He's sold 46 Corvettes in the past three months, including a couple of 2008 Callaway Corvettes that go for about $86,000.

The dealership in the Valley Auto Mall is part of an exclusive network selling the Callaway Corvette, a souped-up version of the standard C6 Corvette that produces 580 horsepower and tops out at more than 200 mph.

Henderson Chevrolet is the only authorized Callaway dealer in Nevada and one of 15 nationwide.

Long said he sold the first Callaway Corvette in two or three days. A buyer traded in a 1971 Stingray with an LT1 engine, Muncie four-speed transmission and 8,100 original miles.

New Corvettes aren't that bad on gasoline, he said. The sticker on the Callaway Corvette shows 14 mpg in the city, 24 mpg on the highway.

"The Corvette is the only high-performance car that doesn't get a gas-guzzler tax," Long said. "I guarantee you can get 26 miles a gallon (highway)."

The Callaway Corvette packs more horsepower than a Z06, but is priced significantly lower than the ZR1, which is around $100,000, Long said. He's sold four of those.

The Callaway Corvette is targeted at enthusiasts who "treat the automobile as a well-tuned, systems-engineered entity," said Pete Callaway, general manager of California-based Callaway West and son of Callaway Cars founder Reeves Callaway.

Overall, automobile sales are definitely down and June was the worst month on record for sales, industry analyst Jessica Caldwell of Edmunds.com said.

"For a while, we saw luxury cars do OK," she said. "It made us think wealthy people are excluded from the down economy."

Then BMW reported a 17 percent decline in sales and Mercedes-Benz offered $1,200 in incentives on its C class launched just last year, Caldwell said.

Sales of luxury SUVs fell to 40,626 in June from 57,002 in the same month a year ago, Edmunds.com reported. However, luxury sports car sales increased to 12,223 from 10,589 a year ago.

While the economic downturn has slowed luxury car sales, there will always be a segment of the population that refuses to settle for less, said Patrick Dunne, professor emeritus of marketing and retail at Texas Tech University.

"The rich are hurt, but they know in the long run it comes back and they don't touch anything," he said. "Their wealth has gone down, but it's not noticeable. They still have income."

Dunne said the definition of luxury car would be different for someone in Texas, New York or California. Some people might consider a Lexus or Cadillac a luxury car. For others, it would have to be a Rolls-Royce or Mercedes-Benz.

Online source Autodata found that sales of vehicles costing $40,000 or more are down steeply across the board. Compared to last year, consumers have bought 100,000 fewer luxury cars in the U.S. through May, a 14 percent decline. Jaguar sales are down 52 percent, BMW 27 percent and Porsche 13 percent.