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At the Volo Auto Museum in rural Illinois, director Brian Grams walks through a 1972 Plymouth Duster finished in Hemi Orange paint and powered by Chrysler’s well-regarded 340 small block V8. It is not the museum’s flashiest car, but the flood of first-car memories it triggered in viewers — from a 1976 Dart Lite to a regretted 1971 Demon — says something about why budget Mopars still matter. Watch to find out what made this compact performance car a museum piece.
A 700-plus horsepower Chevelle convertible, an LS-swapped C10 pickup, a supercharged Hemi Cuda, and a naturally aspirated Ferrari 550 Maranello in the same test drive lineup. Three of them earned their character through modification decades after leaving the factory. One arrived that way. Read on for what separates a restomod from an engineered car, and which of the four actually wins on a back road.
A blue convertible sits with its top down, its E-body lines unmistakably Mopar — but the year and engine are left for you to figure out. Plymouth built only 635 ‘Cuda convertibles in this model year, and a rare few carried an engine option that turned them into million-dollar auction stars. Everything else stayed a well-loved cruiser worth a fraction of that. Take a guess before the details give it away.
A Roseville mother strapped on an Oculus headset at Ford’s Detroit Auto Show booth and found herself flying through a city of drones and self-driving pods — but that virtual reality ride was only half the story. Just steps away, Ford was running live augmented reality demonstrations of real engineering work, including wind tunnel testing on the new Ford GT. The mix of far-future fantasy and present-day product reveal says something about where auto shows were headed.
Ford did not sell the second-generation GT to whoever showed up with a check. Buyers applied, Ford chose, and one of the earliest cars delivered went out the door at $527,000 after its owner specified a paint color that alone cost more than a well-equipped Mustang. Here is how the selection process worked, what the options actually added, and why the car underneath all of it is best understood as a race car that happens to have license plates.
A blue Corvette Stingray sits under studio lights with no year, engine, or trim listed — just a challenge to guess right. The clues are hiding in plain sight: the fender creases, the missing chrome bumpers, and a badge that only a fraction of 1971 buyers ever ordered. This LT1-powered Stingray represents one of the rarest and quickest small-block Corvettes of its generation. Can you spot what makes it special before reading the answer?
An orange convertible in front of an American flag hints strongly at Pontiac’s final first-generation Firebird, built for just one more model year before a full redesign. Convertibles like this one were already far rarer than hardtops in 1969. Here’s what made that final year – and its ultra-rare Trans Am convertible sibling – worth knowing before guessing the details.
Dropping a modern supercharged Hemi into a 1968 Charger sounds like heresy right up until it fires. This car was the first running, driving vintage muscle car built around a genuine 707-horsepower 6.2-liter Hellcat V8 pulled from a 2015 Dodge Charger SRT, a combination that appeared on no order sheet in 1968 and makes far more power than the original 426 Hemi ever did. Read on to find out what it actually takes to make that swap work.
Spotted at the 2017 Bama Coast Cruise alongside the Metal Brothers’ display, this 1955 Chevrolet Nomad pairs a modern LS-series V8 with a traditional, unrestored-looking interior — built to be driven, not trailered. The video and its comments make the case for why Nomads still command a premium over other Tri-Five wagons, and why station wagons in general remain one of the most underrated entry points into classic Chevrolet ownership.
This rusty, graffiti-covered survivor is exactly the kind of car that photo-guessing games were built for, and its condition alone hints at a story spanning decades rather than years. If it’s the car its filename suggests, it may be tied to one of the longest-running project vehicles in American car culture. Here’s the background worth knowing before taking a guess at year, make, and model.
This wing car belongs to one of the shortest-lived, most dominant classes NASCAR ever allowed on track. A towering rear wing and needle-nose front end were the product of an aerodynamics arms race between Dodge, Plymouth, and Ford that lasted barely two seasons. A single new rule about engine displacement is what finally grounded these cars for good – and made surviving examples legendary.
A muscle car buried in its own tire smoke is one of the most recognizable images in car culture, but the tradition behind it runs deeper than a viral photo suggests. Burnouts trace back to dragstrip tire-warming rituals that eventually became a spectacle all their own. Here’s what’s actually happening in the seconds before a car disappears into a cloud like this one.
A single classic-car marketplace crunched a year of search traffic and produced a map that reads like a territorial dispute. Ford and Chevrolet each claimed exactly twenty states, one nameplate racked up nearly four million searches on its own, and one New England state broke ranks entirely. The results say as much about how Americans shop for old cars as they do about brand loyalty. Read on to see where the lines fell.
Thirty-six years in a Great Plains farm shed will bury a car in dust and obscurity, but for a numbers-matching Corvette it can also mean remarkable preservation. This 1965 Sting Ray coupe came out with its original engine and four-speed still in place and the paperwork to prove it. The real story was never on the surface, it was in the documentation. Read on to find out what separates this car from thousands of ordinary small-block Corvettes.
A 1965 Plymouth wearing rare copper paint and a 426 badge sounds like it should be running the legendary Hemi. It isn’t. A full year before the street Hemi rewrote what that number meant, Plymouth was already building a completely different 426 around a wedge combustion chamber. It lasted two model years before disappearing from the brochures almost entirely. Read on to find out what happened to the other 426.