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Ford needed something to embarrass Chevrolet’s Camaro on a road course, and what it built carried a name that started as an inside joke between two engineers. The Boss 302 was rated at 290 hp on paper and closer to 380 in reality. Read on to find out the story behind the name, and why a $3,720 car now sells for over half a million.

The narrator can’t quite settle on how to pronounce GTX, but there’s no confusion about what this 1969 Plymouth can do. This vintage road test pushes the 440-powered GTX through acceleration runs and cornering that surprised even the crew filming it, backed by a factory pedigree tied to Sox and Martin’s NHRA racing program. Watch to find out exactly how fast the quarter-mile route to Squeelsville really was.

AMC spent the late 1960s selling the Rebel as sensible family transportation, a four-door sedan, a wagon, and a hardtop built for buyers who wanted nothing flashy. Then it built The Machine: a 340-hp version of the same car, wrapped in a single red, white, and blue paint scheme with a hood-mounted tachometer. Read on to see how AMC quietly redesigned the Rebel for 1969 and 1970, and how The Machine turned an economy car into a genuine muscle car.

This Petty Blue 1970 Plymouth Superbird carries a documented history that few muscle cars can match — matching-numbers drivetrain, original broadcast sheets, and a rarity rating that puts it ahead of plenty of Hemi cars. Read on to see why paperwork, not just horsepower, makes this survivor special.

Chevrolet built just 201 examples of the 1965 Chevelle Z16, handing a tiny group of buyers a genuine big-block 396 a full year before the option became widely available. One convertible was reportedly built for a GM executive and is believed destroyed; only about 75 of the original run are accounted for today. Read on to find out what made this the rarest Chevelle Chevrolet ever built.

Debbie Powless’s love of Buicks started with her grandfather’s Electra 225, a gift that planted a seed years before she ever owned a Buick herself. After spotting a Riviera at a car show, she searched until she found this exact 1971 Buick Riviera GS Gran Sport in Vintage Red, then restored it from the ground up. Under the hood sits the 455 cubic inch V8 that gives the car its signature sound. Watch to hear it, and to hear how a family hand-me-down turned into a decade-long search.

Dodge tried the Challenger name once in 1958 and quietly shelved it. Twelve years later, the name returned on a pony car built to dominate a segment Dodge had arrived at late. Read on to see how the Challenger’s engine lineup, from the 318 to the 426 Hemi, tried to make up for lost time.

Robert McGaffin’s 1965 Oldsmobile Cutlass F-85 has been cloned into a 442 and fitted with a carbureted 461 cubic-inch big-block, built specifically to handle autocross duty rather than just straight-line bragging rights. Featured in The Drive’s BIG MUSCLE series, it’s a deliberate argument for a brand that rarely gets its due next to Chevrolet and Pontiac. The comments turn into a genuine defense of Oldsmobile power, praising McGaffin for skipping the easy LS-swap route. Watch to see what a serious Olds big-block build actually looks like.

Buying a classic car sounds romantic until the bills start arriving, and TFL Classics built an entire spinoff series around exactly that gap between expectation and reality. Episode 2 of “Load Bearing Paint” counts down the top five pitfalls to avoid, but it’s the comment section that delivers the real lessons, including one viewer’s $250 junkyard find that became a $13,000 project he still doesn’t regret. What separates buyers who finish their projects from the ones who don’t?

This red 1970 El Camino SS wears its black stripe and vinyl top the way Chevrolet intended: parked among the muscle cars it was built to run with, not tucked away in a garage. Underneath the truck bed is a full Chevelle SS drivetrain, and across five model years Chevrolet pushed it from a 325-horsepower newcomer to the 450-horsepower LS6 454 before emissions rules caught up with it. Read on to see how the numbers changed year by year — and why the VIN tag matters more than the badge.

Exactly ten 1966 Plymouth Belvedere II convertibles were built with the factory 426 Hemi, and this one, from The Brothers Collection, is Episode 228 of V8TV’s Muscle Car of the Week series. Most comments focused on the car’s rarity and color — but a few sharp-eyed viewers flagged a driver’s door that doesn’t sit quite right where it meets the rocker panel. On a car built in single-digit numbers, that kind of scrutiny comes with the territory. Watch the full walkaround.

This burgundy 1966 Dodge Charger wears the styling cues that made it an instant standout: hidden headlights borrowed from a 1942 DeSoto trick, a six-lamp taillight panel spelling out its own name, and a white bucket-seat interior built around a full-length console. Only 468 of the 37,344 Chargers built that first year came with the 426 Hemi. Read on for how the fastback nearly flopped as a Rambler copycat before becoming a Dodge Rebellion icon.

Before it was an icon, the Corvette was a hand-built experiment — 300 fiberglass cars glued together in the back of a Flint, Michigan garage by workers who’d never built anything like it. Here’s how rough those first Corvettes really were, and why roughly 225 of them still survive today.

This turquoise-and-white Nash Metropolitan carries a spare tire mounted like a compact ship’s wheel on its trunk lid, chrome hood ornament and whitewalls gleaming in the sun. Built entirely in England by Austin for an American company that couldn’t afford its own tooling, fewer than 95,000 ever landed stateside across eight years. Read on for how a car with four different badges became one of the more affordable classics a collector can still buy today.

Hagerty Executive Editor Stefan Lombard opens with a dare: you really can’t go wrong with a Chevelle, true or false? What follows is a rundown of exactly where Chevelle buyers get burned, from cloned SS badges to rust hiding under a straight-looking floor pan. Watch before you go looking for one yourself.


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