Chevrolet’s wildly-popular COPO Camaro program has been reborn since 2012, with competitors all over this great land of ours procuring their favorite Chevrolet platform that’s been designed to dominate NHRA’s Stock and Super Stock Eliminator classes. Sadly for you street-loving enthusiasts, the COPO doesn’t come with a VIN and is thus illegal for street-going activities. Couple that with the fact that buying one of the rare factory racecars direct from GM involves a fairly comprehensive vetting process to weed out the collectors and tire kickers, and it’s unlikely that any ‘normal’ enthusiast will get a chance to buy one brand new.

However, a quick perusal of the eBay machine this morning turned up a COPO that’s being offered for sale by Keyes Chevrolet in Menomonie, Wisconsin. The car is number 30 of 69 built in 2013, and the eighth of 19 manual-transmission-equipped cars built last year.

Perhaps the best selling point of this particular COPO is the fact that it doesn’t have a single mile on it – that’s right, the odometer reads zero. While that’s not really such a big deal to someone who’s planning to thrash the snot out of it on the dragstrip, it might be of immense value to a collector. The cars hit the retail market for a number somewhere in the $100K zone when new, but who knows what this machine might sell for when the auction is all said and done?

If you’ve got the ability to store a zero-mile COPO, you may be able to double, triple, or even quadruple your investment twenty or thirty years from now when all of the originals have been stuffed into dragstrip walls across the country, or retired once their dragstrip days are over – or you might turn around, invest $100K to buy this bad boy, and find out that it’s only worth $25K years from now. 

This is the nature of investing in collector automobiles. Of course, if we could afford to make the purchase, we’d be at the dragstrip every weekend banging the gearbox behind the high-winding LSX powerplant. Maybe we can take up a collection and store it in a central location, and everyone who donates can use it for a day or three each year. Who’s in?