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Calling this an awesome Chevy truck undersells what actually changed underneath it. 1965 was the year Chevrolet quietly rewrote the rulebook for its half-ton line, adding a 327 V8 to the C10 order sheet and offering factory in-dash air conditioning on a vehicle otherwise fitted with a vinyl bench and a column shifter. None of it shows in the sheetmetal. Here is what separates a 1965 short wide bed from the trucks that came just before it.
This replica sounds fantastic, but the original 1955 Porsche 550 Spyder it’s copying has a story darker than any muscle car legend. James Dean owned his for nine days before it killed him, and the wreckage that survived went missing decades ago despite a standing million-dollar reward. Here’s the real history behind the car everyone still calls ‘Little Bastard.’
Jay Leno’s garage holds hundreds of cars, but only a handful made the cut when The Drive asked him to name his American muscle favorites. The list runs from an expected numbers-matching Hemi Challenger to a reworked Oldsmobile Toronado throwing over 1,000 horsepower at its rear wheels — proof that even a career car collector’s favorites can still surprise.
A four-cylinder Mustang sounds like a contradiction, but Ford’s 2.3-liter EcoBoost makes more torque than the V6 it replaced, delivers it 1,600 rpm sooner, and returns 32 mpg on the highway. It also takes weight off the nose and responds to tuning in ways a naturally aspirated engine never could. The compromise is the noise, and it is a real one. Read on for why Ford already tried this once in 1984.
The Challenger SRT Demon’s launch procedure reads like a checklist from a flight manual: line lock, brake, burnout, stage, release. Behind it sits a system that builds boost before the car moves, a set of factory drag radials, and an air conditioning circuit repurposed to chill intake air. The front wheels leave the ground by nearly three feet. Read on for how Dodge got there, and what the car is like the rest of the time.
In November 2016, a Ford F-450 reclaimed the Guinness World Record for Largest Flag Pulled by a Moving Vehicle, towing a 4,124-square-foot American flag around Homestead-Miami Speedway to beat a Chevrolet Silverado’s earlier record by nearly 1,000 square feet. The Super Duty’s 440-horsepower, 925-lb-ft Power Stroke diesel V-8 got credit for the pull, which stretched well past the minimum distance required to set the new mark. It’s proof that truck bragging rights aren’t only settled at the drag strip.
Two Highland Green Mustangs were built for the chase scene in Bullitt, and for fifty years the accepted story was that only one survived. Both turned out to be alive. This is what Ford actually put in an S-code 390 GT fastback, what Max Balchowsky changed before the cameras rolled, how fast these cars really were once the stopwatch came out, and what happened when the hero car finally crossed an auction block in 2020.
The 1969 Plymouth Road Runner was the year the budget muscle car formula worked exactly as intended, and 84,420 buyers proved it. Behind the cartoon horn sat an exclusive 383 four-barrel making 335 horsepower, built from parts borrowed off the far more expensive 440. Here is what Plymouth actually did to that engine, why air-conditioned cars got a different one, and what separates a real 383 four-speed car from a badge job today.
GM’s 1971 switch to low-lead fuel dropped the Buick 455’s compression from 10.0:1 to 8.5:1, and the Stage 1 rating fell from 360 horsepower to 345. Buick built the car anyway, with a hotter camshaft, larger valves, a recalibrated Quadrajet and 3.42 Positraction as standard, and roughly 81 of them left the factory as convertibles. Period tests still recorded mid-13-second quarter miles. Read on for what a genuine Stage 1 has to prove before you write the check.
Buick built well over a hundred thousand Special sedans for 1953, and yet this ordinary four-door quietly marked the end of an engine era nobody at the time realized was closing. A brand-new V8 was already going into more than half of Buick’s output that year, just not into this car. Here is why Buick held its most affordable model back, and what else changed underneath in the same twelve months.
Alf’s 1965 Chevy II Nova SS still wears its original California dealer plates, decades after Hovey-Dallas Chevrolet first sold it — only now it’s a familiar sight near Seaview Road outside Adelaide, Australia, following a 2008 import. The car runs its factory 283 V8 and PowerGlide transmission, kept close to stock except for dual Flowmaster mufflers and a fresh set of mags. Read on to see how a documented, three-owner Nova crossed an ocean and stayed true to its roots.
More than 800 cars packed Cobo Center for the 65th annual Detroit Autorama in 2017, one of the most significant gatherings in the hot rod and custom car world. The Ridler Award, reserved for cars debuting for the very first time in public, went to a scratch-built 1933 Ford Roadster running a 427 big block. What else was hiding among 800 cars competing for the hobby’s biggest stage?
A 1960 Chevrolet Impala convertible in Ermine White carries an engine option so rare that one longtime fan estimates only a few hundred were built this way: the 348 Tri-Power, three two-barrel carburetors feeding a car most buyers ordered with a single four-barrel instead. Volo Auto Museum’s Brian Grams walks through this loaded survivor with My Car Story host Lou Costabile, and the story it tells — from Sydney to a car show price tag decades later — says a lot about how these cars are valued today. Watch to see what made this one worth keeping.
Somewhere in America sits a single 1965 Chevelle convertible that Chevrolet built completely differently from every other Malibu on the lot, and for decades most people who saw it had no idea why. Chevy had a new big-block ready to show off and, rather than quietly bolt it into a few cars, engineers built an entire limited package around it. Only 201 were made, and fewer than eighty are believed to survive.
Yenko cars from this era mean one thing to most collectors: a big-block shoehorned into something that had no business being that quick. Then the 1970 Nova wearing Yenko badges broke the pattern completely. Don Yenko had built his entire reputation on 427-powered COPO monsters, and for 1970 he skipped the big-block altogether. The reason had less to do with engineering than with insurance underwriters.