If you’ve been waiting on a 2025 or 2026 C8 Corvette at your local dealership, there’s a reason it might be sitting in the back. GM has put a stop-sale notice on roughly 3,324 of them after finding a problem with a lighting warning system.
The culprit is the Rear Brake Light Outage Detection module. Its job is simple: let you know if a rear turn signal bulb has stopped working. Right now, it isn’t doing that job reliably on certain cars. Under Federal Motor Vehicle Safety Standard 108, that kind of notification isn’t optional, so GM had little choice but to pull the cars from sale.
Of the 3,324 affected units, 438 are from the 2025 model year and the remaining 2,886 are 2026s. The split matters because the two groups are looking at different paths to a fix. Owners of 2026 Corvettes should be able to resolve the issue with an over-the-air software update once it’s ready. The 2025 cars will require a dealer visit. Either way, no timeline has been given yet.
One thing worth clarifying: this doesn’t affect Corvettes already on the road. If you bought yours and it’s sitting in your driveway, you haven’t been told to stop driving it. This only applies to unsold inventory. To check if your vehicle is part of the affected batch, look up GM program number N252541250 or NHTSA recall number 26V213.
Given that this is a software-only problem with no hardware involved, a resolution probably isn’t too far off. For now though, those Corvettes stay put.
