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Chevrolet built the 1987 Monte Carlo SS Aerocoupe strictly to satisfy NASCAR’s homologation rules — but production exploded from 200 cars in 1986 to over 6,000 the following year once buyers caught on. That steeply raked backlight wasn’t just a superspeedway trick; it turned into one of the most collectible G-bodies Chevrolet ever built.
In 1960, half a million Americans bought a Chevrolet Impala, making it the best-selling car in the country that year. Most drove home with a modest six-cylinder or small V-8 — but buried in the order form sat a genuine big-block option most showroom shoppers never noticed. Five versions of the 348 cubic-inch engine, topped by a 335-horsepower tri-power variant, turned an ordinary family car into a legitimate sleeper. Read on to see why collectors hunt for that combination specifically.
This 1962 Buick Invicta wagon carries the nickname “Airwagon,” earned when Air Ride Technologies took on the rare nine-passenger body style as a build project. Under the hood sits a numbers-matching 401 Nailhead V8, swapped from its original two-speed Turbine Drive automatic to a smoother four-speed. Gateway Classic Cars photographed the full car for this gallery, from the engine bay to the polished chrome trim, one of the least common body styles Buick built during the Invicta’s run.
The 1940 Ford Deluxe didn’t just out-style its Depression-era rivals — it quietly became one of the best-selling cars in America and handed hot rodders the flathead V-8 platform they’d spend the next fifty years building an entire culture around. From the Lincoln Zephyr-inspired nose to the three-speed column shifter, every detail on this car earned its keep.
Plymouth built the 1970 Superbird for exactly one model year, in exactly one body style, to accomplish exactly one thing: win at NASCAR and bring Richard Petty back from Ford. It did both. Then dealers could not give the leftovers away, and buyers had the wings removed to make them sellable. Today those same cars are six-figure collector pieces. Read on for how that reversal happened.
The Plymouth Barracuda beat the Ford Mustang to market by two weeks in April 1964, yet spent the next decade being remembered as the follower rather than the pioneer. Across three generations – from its Valiant-based origins with the largest rear window ever fitted to a production car, to the dedicated E-body platform that could be ordered with the 426 Hemi – the Barracuda repeatedly reinvented itself before the 1973 energy crisis ended its run after 1974.
This 1968 Camaro pairs the SS-package 350 V8 – good for 295 horsepower and 380 lb-ft of torque – with the desirable M20 wide-ratio four-speed manual. It’s also a car built in the one model year that offered ten different engines and introduced federally mandated side marker lights along with the vent-window-deleting “Astro Ventilation” design, small details that separate a ’68 Camaro from the ’67 it followed.
A 3.8-liter V6 and a 3-speed automatic don’t sound like the recipe for one of America’s best-selling cars, yet that’s roughly what powered this silver 1984 Oldsmobile Cutlass Supreme. Between five available powertrains and four trim levels, Oldsmobile built a formula flexible enough to out-sell nearly everything else on the road. Read on to see how a mild-mannered mid-size coupe pulled that off.
1969 was the final and best-selling year of the original Camaro, with a mid-cycle restyle that gave the car its most aggressive first-generation look. Small-block, automatic-equipped cars like this one were far more common than the COPO 427 legends that dominate auction headlines — and they’re just as much a part of the model’s story.
In 1964, Ford squeezed a race-bred 427 V8 into the Galaxie 500, and NASCAR promptly banned the racing version as “too exotic” before it could dominate a single superspeedway. Only 3,140 R-code Galaxies were built that year, and just 76 are known to survive today. Here’s the story behind Ford’s short-lived big-block gamble and the handful of survivors still turning heads.
Chrysler’s Imperial spent 1969 through 1973 as the longest postwar personal luxury car short of a limousine, and it hid some genuinely strange engineering under all that sheet metal, including the first four-wheel anti-lock braking system offered on an American car and a vinyl roof that mysteriously faded into a purple paisley pattern. The G4 Imperial is far more interesting than its sales figures suggest.
1968 was a one-year-only moment for the Dodge Charger: its dual circular taillights and reworked fastback body never appeared again after that model year. Under the hood of this R/T sits a 440 Magnum V8 good for 375 horsepower and a sub-6.2-second run to 60 mph. That same body style would go on to chase Steve McQueen through Bullitt just months later.
The 1970 Hemi ‘Cuda shares its basic body with a car Plymouth once sold as sensible transportation, and yet it routinely outruns period Ferraris at auction. The reason is not styling, and it is not nostalgia. It comes down to a single option box that almost nobody checked, a production number small enough to memorize, and an engine Chrysler built for the racetrack first. Here is the whole story.
The first-generation Chevelle produced one of the rarest and most faked muscle cars General Motors ever built. Only 201 Z-16 Malibu SS 396 cars were assembled in 1965, roughly 75 are believed to survive, and their six-figure values have created an entire cottage industry of counterfeits. The reason the fakes fall apart has nothing to do with paperwork. Read on for how to read a real one, and what made the 1966 SS 396 different.
This 1934 Ford, nicknamed ‘Panther’ by its current owners, was built just two years after Ford introduced its groundbreaking flathead V8, the engine that made eight-cylinder power affordable for the first time. By 1934, Ford had resolved the flathead’s early reliability problems and pushed output to around 90 horsepower. That combination made 1932-34 Fords the founding platform of American hot rodding.