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Nearly two decades before airbags became mandatory, General Motors quietly built and sold them, first on government fleet cars, then as a factory option across four full-size luxury nameplates. Here is the surprisingly early and short-lived story of GM’s Air Cushion Restraint System, and why the technology vanished from showrooms for almost twenty years.
Guessing the year on a prewar Oldsmobile convertible is trickier than it looks: the drop-top body and the straight-eight engine collectors often look for did not actually arrive on the same model in the same year. Here is how to tell a real Series 60 from the bigger, straight-eight-powered senior cars, and why so few of these soft tops survived to be argued over today.
Ford did not build the Boss 429 because customers were asking for it. NASCAR’s rulebook demanded that a race engine be sold to the public before it could compete, so Ford dropped a semi-hemi big block into the one car nobody expected — and then discovered the regular assembly line could not physically build it. Only 859 left the shop in 1969. Read on for what that homologation gamble actually cost, and whether it paid off.
The Charlie Thomas Collection brought roughly 145 vehicles to Barrett-Jackson’s 2017 Scottsdale auction, selling for a combined $7.1 million as part of a week that ultimately generated $102.5 million and set 40 world records. Here’s a look at what one of the largest single-owner collections in recent Barrett-Jackson history actually sold for, and how it fit into a record-breaking week.
This red Trans Am looks like any other mid-’70s Pontiac at first glance, but 1974 was the year Pontiac quietly offered one of its rarest and most serious engines: the hand-built SD-455. Only 943 cars left the factory with it. Here’s what made the Super Duty 455 special, and how to spot the styling details that pin this car to its exact model year.
Barrett-Jackson’s first Northeast auction at Mohegan Sun sold out on opening day, so for its second year, the company added an extra day, a new concours event, and a deeper lineup of collector cars. Here’s what the expanded 2017 event actually delivered, from the final sales total to the Ride ‘N Drives that let fans test-drive new muscle cars between bids.
Learning to drive a manual transmission used to be a rite of passage for muscle car fans, usually behind the wheel of a hand-me-down or a patient parent’s classic. As stick shifts have all but disappeared from new car lots, that tradition has gotten rarer by the year. Here’s a look at how manual transmissions went from standard equipment to an enthusiast novelty, and why a small comeback might be underway.
Ford’s Mustang beat the Camaro and Challenger for a fifth straight month in March 2017, extending a streak to 27 wins in 29 months, but the raw sales totals hid a steep year-over-year decline. This piece unpacks the numbers behind that streak, why Camaro and Challenger were actually closing the gap underneath it, and what a winning streak built on a shrinking base actually signals.
This black widebody coupe, with its flared fenders and hood vents, was posted purely as a guessing game: name the year and model, then rate it. Widebody and flare kits like this one trace back to the exotic-inspired custom builds of the late 1970s and ’80s, when builders reshaped stock bodies to look more aggressive and race-ready. Take your best guess before scrolling further to see how close you got.
Eleanor tributes have become so common on the show circuit that most of them disappear into the crowd, wearing identical gray paint and identical black stripes. This 1967 G.T. 500 was built by an owner who clearly decided that was the whole problem, keeping the fastback bones everyone recognizes while throwing out the formula that makes the rest interchangeable. They call it the Pit Viper. Read on to find out what makes it different.
This red Charger is a 1968 model, the year Dodge completely reworked the car’s fastback shape into the coke-bottle, flying-buttress body that’s instantly recognizable today. The redesign worked — sales jumped roughly sixfold over the outgoing model, with about 96,100 built for the year. Order the R/T package and buyers got a standard 440 Magnum V8, with the fabled 426 Hemi available for those who wanted more.
This driveway shot captures a 1966 Pontiac GTO, the year the GTO graduated from an options package on the Tempest to a model of its own. Buyers who ticked the box for the 389 cubic-inch Tri-Power engine got 360 horsepower, helping make 1966 the GTO’s best sales year yet. See if you can spot the details that give away the year before reading on.
For the first time in at least seven years, the Dodge Challenger outsold both the Ford Mustang and Chevrolet Camaro in a single month, arriving right as the 840-horsepower SRT Demon dominated headlines. This piece looks at the June 2017 sales numbers behind that milestone, the year-to-date totals that told a very different story, and what became of Challenger’s long production run afterward.
Ask a room full of Mustang owners how many 1966 GTs Ford actually built and you will get answers scattered across a very wide range, most of them wrong in one direction or the other. The GT Equipment Group had only existed for a single model year before 1966, and Ford’s factory records from the period are not as tidy as collectors would like. The real number surprises people who assume GTs were either far rarer or far more common than they were. Read on for the figure and why it keeps getting argued about.
More than 200 classic, sport, and muscle cars filled Saratoga Spa State Park for the Saratoga Automobile Museum’s 15th annual spring show. The museum itself has an unusual backstory, housed in a repurposed neoclassical building that once served as a New York State bottling plant. The turnout capped off a season-opening event with an audience built from the region’s century-old resort-town appeal. Read on to find out what made this year’s show stand out.