Breakdown/Review: 1967 Camaro “Cherokee” Concept Show Car

Long before the 1968 Corvette reached showrooms, GM design chief Bill Mitchell used a one-off 1967 Camaro convertible called the Cherokee to test styling ideas that would define it. Muscle Car Of The Week talks with restorer Charley Hutton about bringing the car back, including bumper and color details subtle enough that even longtime Camaro owners miss them. Watch to see the concept even collectors rarely know exists.

Bill Mitchell didn’t build show cars to sell you something. He built them to prove GM’s styling division could do things production rules wouldn’t allow, and in 1967 one of those experiments rolled out wearing a name that had nothing to do with Chevrolet’s usual naming conventions. The “Cherokee” started life as a one-off Camaro convertible, and if the shape looks slightly familiar in ways you can’t quite place, that’s not an accident. Muscle Car Of The Week sat down with the man who spent years bringing it back, and what he has to say about the car’s hidden influence on a much more famous Chevrolet is the real reason to keep watching past the first few minutes.

One of a Kind, Literally

The Cherokee was built by Bill Mitchell and GM’s styling division in 1967 as a genuine one-off, a custom Camaro convertible with no direct connection to anything Chevrolet actually sold to the public that year. Concept cars like this existed to let designers test ideas in three dimensions long before, or sometimes instead of, those ideas ever reached a production line.

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A Preview of the Next Corvette

What makes the Cherokee more than a styling curiosity is what it previewed. Several of its design touches foreshadowed the 1968 Corvette, due out the following model year, and one commenter specifically points to “Mako Shark influence” visible in the hood treatment, a direct line back to Mitchell’s earlier Mako Shark II concept, the car that most directly shaped the C3 Corvette’s entire design language.

The Man Behind the Restoration

Bringing a fifty-plus-year-old one-off back from wherever it had been sitting is its own story, and this video features an interview with the customizer behind the restoration, Charley Hutton. One commenter with deep restoration knowledge called the finished result a “masterpiece,” a word that gets thrown around loosely in this hobby but is used here by someone who clearly understands what a period-correct, historically accurate restoration actually requires.

Details Easy to Miss at First Glance

The details easiest to miss on a first pass are often the ones that matter most. A commenter pointed out the Cherokee’s split front-and-rear bumper treatment, a detail unique to this car among 1967-68 Camaros. The paint color, described by one viewer as looking like “a wet candied apple,” is subtle enough in person that even longtime Camaro owners in the comments admitted they didn’t notice some of the modifications on their first look.

Shot at the Show Built for Cars Like This

This particular restoration was shot at the 2013 Muscle Car & Corvette Nationals in Rosemont, Illinois, an event built specifically around cars like this one: rare factory experimentals, one-off show cars, and pieces from serious private collections like the Brothers Collection that rarely surface anywhere else. It’s the kind of venue where a car like the Cherokee can actually get the attention and expert commentary it deserves.

A Camaro Even Longtime Owners Had Never Heard Of

Perhaps the most telling comment comes from a viewer who says he’s owned at least a dozen ’67-’68 Camaros over the years and had never once heard of the Cherokee before watching this video. For a concept car to stay that far under the radar, even among people who’ve spent decades immersed in exactly this generation of Camaro, says something about how quietly GM’s styling experiments could disappear once their job was done.

Why Obscurity Makes a Concept More Valuable, Not Less

That obscurity is part of what makes surviving factory concepts like the Cherokee so valuable historically, independent of whatever they might fetch at auction. Production cars get documented endlessly, in factory literature, owner’s manuals, and decades of enthusiast research. One-off styling exercises often exist only in a handful of period photos, a few insider memories, and, if they’re lucky, a surviving physical example like this one.

What Gets Lost Without Cars Like This

Without cars like the Cherokee surviving intact, the design lineage connecting concepts like the Mako Shark II to production cars like the C3 Corvette becomes a lot harder to trace with any real evidence. A restoration like this one doesn’t just save a car, it preserves a physical link in GM design history that would otherwise exist mostly as secondhand recollection and speculation among people who were there.

A Debate This Restoration Helps Settle

Whether the Cherokee ever directly influenced a single production decision or simply reflected ideas already circulating through Mitchell’s studio at the time is something historians still debate. What isn’t up for debate is that a restoration this thorough, backed by an interview with the person who did the actual work, gives modern viewers a far better basis for that debate than a few faded photographs ever could.

How Many Other Concepts Never Got This Chance

It also raises a broader point about how many other one-off GM concepts from this same era simply never got this kind of second chance. For every Cherokee that survives long enough to find a restorer with the patience and budget to bring it back correctly, there are almost certainly others that were quietly scrapped once the auto show circuit moved on, their design ideas absorbed into production cars without any surviving physical record of where those ideas actually came from. That makes a documented, interview-backed restoration like this one doubly valuable: it preserves both the car and the story behind it, at a point where the people who actually remember building it are still around to tell that story firsthand.

A Chapter of Camaro History Most Owners Will Never Touch

For Camaro collectors specifically, the Cherokee also reframes what “first-generation Camaro” history even includes. Most collector attention understandably goes toward Z/28s, SS models, and other genuine production performance variants, cars people can actually buy, restore, and drive today. A surviving one-off like the Cherokee sits outside that entire market, uncopyable and unbuyable in any meaningful sense, which is exactly why a video like this one matters to people who will never own anything remotely like it: it’s one of the only ways most enthusiasts will ever get to see this specific chapter of Camaro history up close.

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