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GM design chief Bill Mitchell wanted a full-size luxury coupe with the drama of a 1930s speedster, and the boattail Riviera is what happened. He modeled its tapered tail on the 1963 Corvette Sting Ray he considered his masterpiece, then watched the shape get stretched across a much larger body. Mitchell himself later admitted the result looked less like a speedboat than a tugboat. This 1973 example, the last year of the design, went through Count’s Kustoms.
The car everyone calls General Lee was never one car. It was a small army of 1969 Dodge Chargers, and most of them did not survive the job. Across 147 episodes, producers reportedly went through roughly 300 of them, scouting from the air and buying out of parking lots faster than the used car market could supply them. Only 18 were left on the lot when the show wrapped. Read on for the most destructive relationship between a TV show and a car in Hollywood history.
Plymouth built the Road Runner on a contrarian idea: strip out the luxury everyone else was adding, keep the price low, and let an enormous engine do the talking. Sales projections were in the low thousands. It sold forty-four thousand in its first year. Read on for the cartoon licensing deal, the horn that cost ten thousand dollars to develop, and the mid-year option package that turned a budget muscle car into a Hemi hunter.
Automakers build pilot cars to shake down a new model before the assembly line starts, then usually destroy them. That makes any survivor a genuinely strange thing to find in a driveway. This early-build 1970 Chevelle SS396 carries the sort of details that make researchers reach for a flashlight and start checking stampings. Read on to find out what the metal underneath would actually have to prove.
Pontiac built 6,833 GTO Judges for 1969 and only 108 of them were convertibles. This one is believed to be the last Judge convertible built for the model year, wearing a special-order color and carrying the 366-horsepower Ram Air III 400. The Judge started life as John DeLorean’s plan for a cheap, stripped GTO to fight the Road Runner, and then got optioned into something else entirely. Here is how that happened.
The Ford Falcon Sprint never got a nickname, a movie role, or a bedroom poster, and yet the Mustang almost certainly does not happen without it. For two and a half model years it quietly proved Americans would pay extra for a compact with a V8 under the hood, then disappeared the moment its own successor reached showrooms. Its platform, suspension, and engines all carried straight over. Read on for the compact Ford that wrote the pony car playbook first.
The 1965 Ford Falcon Futura is one of the most consequential cars almost nobody talks about. Ford’s compact outsold expectations by an enormous margin, and the engineering underneath it went on to carry the Mustang, the Fairlane, and a long list of Ford performance cars. In Futura trim with a 289 it was quietly quick. Read on for why clean V8 Futuras have become sneaky collector cars.
Chevrolet builds 69 COPO Camaros a year, sells every one, and not a single one of them can legally touch a public road. The name traces back to a 1969 paperwork loophole that let dealers order 427-powered Camaros the option book said did not exist, including 69 cars with an all-aluminum ZL1 big-block. Chevy revived the idea at the 2011 SEMA Show and has staged the reveal there almost every fall since. Here is how the trick actually worked.
Two headline Challengers arrived in the same 2017 news cycle, and enthusiasts have been mixing them up ever since. The all-wheel-drive one was the Challenger GT, a Pentastar V6 coupe aimed at snow-belt buyers. The 840-horsepower one was the rear-drive SRT Demon that lifted its front wheels off the pavement and ran 9.65 at 140 mph. Here is what each car actually was, and why Dodge needed both at once.
Most barn finds are interesting for what has gone wrong with them. This 1964 Dodge Polara is interesting for what stayed right: a factory big block and a four-speed still in place after decades in rural Texas. Polaras almost never get the attention Chargers and Coronets do, which is exactly how a car like this hides in plain sight. Read on to find out what Dodge was really building in 1964.
This 1982 Chevrolet Corvette Collector Edition, finished in Silver Beige, marks the final year of the C3 body style and comes with a feature no other C3 ever got: a rear hatch that actually opens. Lou Costabile tracks it down at Corvette Mike Midwest in Burr Ridge, Illinois, where owner Bill Kotzum has specialized in Corvettes since 2004. Watch to find out what else makes this Collector Edition unique.
This 1968 Chevrolet C/10, nicknamed the 68 Special, gets the restomod formula right by knowing when to stop. The interior is custom without being loud, the stance looks measured rather than slammed, and the induction under the hood is a stacked injection setup that tells you what the truck is actually for. Read on for why the 1967 to 1972 C10 became the most-built platform in the hobby and what stacks really do.
By 1980 emissions rules had taken most of the horsepower out of Detroit, and Pontiac needed its flagship to look fast whether or not it actually was. The answer was a turbocharger bolted onto a 301 small-block and the largest hood decal General Motors ever approved. Mike Musto put one to the test. Read on to find out whether the numbers backed up the theater.
The 1967 Corvette offered more ways to buy 427 cubic inches than most buyers realized, and choosing wrong meant living with a car that was either too polite or too high-strung to enjoy. This numbers-matching L68 convertible sits deliberately in the middle. Read on to find out why the middle child of the big-block lineup is the one experienced Corvette people quietly recommend.
Some builds put two things together that were never supposed to meet. Cleveland Power and Performance took a 1969 Dodge Charger body, a shape recognizable at fifty yards, and married it to a modern supercharged chassis that makes more than twice the horsepower the original engineers ever contemplated. Read on to find out why they swapped the body onto the frame instead of the engine into the car.