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Chevrolet’s brand-new 1966 Caprice was built for comfort, not speed — until you check the option sheet. Buried at the top sat the RPO L72, a 425-horsepower 427 big block that Chevrolet installed in just 1,856 full-size cars that year. This particular Caprice carries that rare combination under its luxury trim. It’s an odd, rare pairing that still turns heads wherever it shows up today.
The AC Cobra didn’t start out as the V8 icon everyone remembers — Carroll Shelby had to rip out its underpowered straight-six and drop in a Ford V8 to make the legend happen. Only 998 originals were ever built. This modern replica carries the same shape forward in carbon fiber over a tubular steel frame, shedding weight the original engineers never could.
A nineteenth-century French physicist’s glass jar of lead and acid still powers every muscle car on the road today. Gaston Plante’s 1859 lead-acid battery set the template that Delco and Detroit’s big-block engines would come to depend on for reliable starts. Here is how a decades-old invention quietly shaped the cars in this trivia list.
The 1966 Jaguar E-Type’s biggest upgrade wasn’t more horsepower, it was everything Jaguar fixed around the engine. A larger 4.2-liter inline six gained real mid-range torque, a fully synchronized gearbox erased the old car’s notoriously balky first gear, and a modernized electrical system made the E-Type as usable as it was beautiful. These photos, courtesy of Gateway Classic Cars, showcase a Series 1 example from the era widely considered the E-Type’s mechanical sweet spot.
LaSalle spent thirteen years as Cadillac’s stylish, budget-friendly companion make, only to be discontinued in 1940 at nearly the peak of its popularity. This surviving 1940 example rides on a modern V8 and automatic transmission far removed from its original L-head engine and manual gearbox. Its final year of production still puzzles collectors who wonder why GM walked away from a car selling so well.
Chrysler had a problem in 1968: the Plymouth Road Runner was selling so well that the Dodge division was watching the money go past its own showroom windows. The answer arrived at the Detroit auto show wearing a bee on its tail and carrying the lowest price tag in the Dodge lineup. Only 125 buyers ticked the one box that turned it into something else entirely. Read on to find out which one.
The 1975 Oldsmobile Cutlass 4-4-2 arrived just as the muscle car era was winding down, wearing a badge built on 1960s bravado but backed by a 455 V8 rated at a modest 190 horsepower. Buyers could even order the package with a six-cylinder engine, something unthinkable a decade earlier. These photos from Gateway Classic Cars capture a transitional Cutlass caught between its muscle-car past and Detroit’s new economy-first priorities.
General Motors banned its divisions from racing in 1963, which should have ended Pontiac’s performance program on the spot. Instead, a handful of engineers found a loophole in the rulebook and shipped a 389-cubic-inch coupe as an option package on a mid-size Tempest. Management capped it at 5,000 units because they were certain nobody wanted another muscle car. Read on to find out how badly they misjudged it.
From 1966 to 1969, the Pontiac Beaumont was sold only in Canada, nearly identical to a Chevrolet Chevelle, right down to a shared 396 big block, but distinguished by little more than its tail lights. The range-topping Sport Deluxe became 396-only for its final two years, and just 65 convertibles were built in 1968, every one of them with the big block. Read on to find out why Canadian winters made this rare Chevelle twin even harder to find today.
The 2008 Dodge Challenger SRT8 launched with a waiting list before most buyers ever sat in one, thanks to a shortened LC platform, a numbered dash plaque, and a 425-horsepower Hemi under the hood. Riding on the same bones as the Chrysler 300 and Dodge Charger, it kept the long-hood look that made the original Challenger famous. Only 6,400 were built for the U.S. market, and nearly every one sold above sticker.
Pontiac never sold the Tempest in Canada, so GM built an entirely separate nameplate to fill the gap: the Acadian, a Chevy II underneath wearing no Pontiac or Chevrolet badge at all, sold through Pontiac-Buick dealerships from 1962 to 1971. It was exported as far as Chile and South Africa, spun off its own Beaumont sub-model onto the Chevelle platform, and quietly outlasted most people’s memory of it ever existing. Read on to find out how a domestic-content law created one of GM’s strangest badge-engineering stories.
The 1964 Ford Falcon debuted a squarer, more mature restyle and a genuine performance option in the Sprint package, built around the Fairlane’s 260 V8. Few buyers realized this unassuming compact supplied the unitized chassis, suspension, and drivetrain components that became the foundation of the Mustang. Interchangeable parts made the Falcon easy to keep on the road, but harder to keep in Ford’s spotlight.
This 1963 Studebaker Gran Turismo Hawk carries a four-barrel 289 V8 and a 3-speed Flight-O-Matic automatic, but Studebaker actually offered the engine in four different states of tune that year, including a supercharged version most fans have never heard of. Built during the company’s final years of U.S. passenger car production, every surviving GT Hawk is a piece of automotive history. Here’s what made this compact grand tourer more interesting than it looks.
The 2014 Corvette Stingray and Z51 came in six trims spanning a $56,000 to $67,000 price range, but the real story is what GM packed into every one of them: a reworked interior with no visible plastic, a driver mode dial that changes the steering itself, and a Z51 version quick enough to worry cars costing twice as much. Read on to find out which spec sheet actually tells the truth about this generation.
A year after landing in receivership, Studebaker didn’t retreat — it redesigned its entire lineup and bet the company’s recovery on it. The 1934 Commander Regal arrived with an engineer-driven inline-eight and two features years ahead of their time, and sales more than doubled overnight. Here’s how a company on the brink turned one model year into a genuine comeback.