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MotorTrend paired three muscle car legends with their modern descendants — a ’69 Camaro SS396 against a 2011 Camaro SS, a ’70 Challenger against a 2011 SRT8, and a ’69 Shelby against a modern GT500 convertible — to settle whether nostalgia holds up against real engineering progress. The results aren’t as simple as newer-is-better. Watch to see which era actually wins the argument.
This 1980 AMC AMX Spirit has under 8,000 original miles and has stayed with owner Bud Brick, unmodified, since 2011 — a remarkable survival story for a car built by the smallest of Detroit’s automakers. Its straight-six engine draws real praise in the comments from owners who gave up only about 10 horsepower compared to the V8 option. My Car Story host Lou Costabile continues his search for overlooked American survivors. See how well this AMC has held up.
The Plymouth Barracuda beat the Ford Mustang to market by two weeks in April 1964, yet spent the next decade being remembered as the follower rather than the pioneer. Across three generations – from its Valiant-based origins with the largest rear window ever fitted to a production car, to the dedicated E-body platform that could be ordered with the 426 Hemi – the Barracuda repeatedly reinvented itself before the 1973 energy crisis ended its run after 1974.
Saabkyle04 gives the 1970 Ford Mustang Mach 1 the same in-depth, first-person treatment he brings to everything from vintage Impalas to Lamborghinis — start-up, exhaust note, and a full walkthrough of what changed when Ford swapped in the 351 Cleveland V8. One commenter’s memory of staring at his brother-in-law’s Mach 1 for hours in 1972 says as much about this car’s legacy as any spec sheet could. Watch the full review to hear that exhaust note for yourself.
A 1964 Pontiac Catalina Safari that started life as a police wagon now runs a 468-cubic-inch Nelson Racing Engines big-block under the hood, turning the least glamorous body style in Detroit’s lineup into what The Drive’s BIG MUSCLE crew calls a tire-shredding monster. The comment section is already campaigning for a full season of wagon builds. Watch to see what convinced them.
A green Dodge Challenger running a genuine 426 Hemi hits a half-mile stretch of track with nothing held back, and the resulting sound has kept this clip circulating in Mopar circles for years. Car Acceleration TV captured both the numbers and the unmuffled roar of one of Detroit’s most legendary big-blocks doing exactly what it was built to do. This is the elephant engine, unleashed.
Drag racing legend Don Garlits personally introduces the HellScat, a one-of-a-kind Dodge Challenger engineered past 1,000 horsepower and built specifically to be given away for charity. The name mashes up two existing Dodge trims, but the build goes well beyond anything either one offered from the factory. See why a figure as credible as Garlits was the right person to tell this car’s story.
A 1968 Dodge Charger body, a twin-turbo Viper V10, and a Corvette chassis underneath — this Swedish-built hybrid took five years to complete and reportedly left Jay Leno speechless. Street-legal and rated around 1,000 horsepower, it’s the kind of build that mixes three unrelated platforms into something none of their original manufacturers ever intended. Commenters keep coming back to one detail above all else: the sound. Watch to hear why.
This vintage road test puts Ford’s flagship 1968 Shelby GT500KR — the “King of the Road” — through its paces, complete with a narrator whose catchphrases are still being quoted in the comments decades later. Viewers reacted to a 6.2-second acceleration figure with genuine disbelief, while others noted the era’s characteristic brake fade after repeated hard stops. One commenter even claims The Doors’ Jim Morrison owned one. Watch to hear “happy time” for yourself.
Ten thousand photographs, six months of shop time, and one badly worn 1967 Mustang convertible come together in this time-lapse restoration from Julius Bencko’s former shop, Mustangs4you.com. Convertibles from this era carry restoration challenges hardtops never face, from reinforced unibody structure to convertible-specific top mechanisms that are notoriously difficult to source. Watch a frame-off restoration compress six months of invisible labor into just a few minutes.
Chevrolet’s first-generation Chevelle ran for just four model years on one basic body shell, which means telling a 1964 from a 1965, or a 1966 from a 1967, comes down to details as small as a taillight lens or a grille shape. One spotting-guide video turned into a comment-section deep dive on exactly what those tells are – and a debate over which year actually looks best that nobody could settle. Watch to see if you can spot the differences yourself.
Mark Hassett already owned a Yenko Camaro, Chevelle, and Nova, all painted the same shade of orange, before a Yenko Stinger Vega came up for sale and completed the set. My Car Story with Lou Costabile catches up with the car at the Muscle Car and Corvette Nationals, where decades of Vega rust jokes in the comments collide with a genuinely rare piece of Yenko performance history. Watch to see the car most people forget Yenko ever built.
A 1970 Dodge Challenger RT with a numbers-matching 383 started its second life with a $50 bill of sale from a seller in prison and a title that was never transferred. What followed was a sixteen-year, one-stall-garage restoration that survived job changes, lost interest, and a race against a newborn’s due date. Read on to find out what’s under the hood now.
A private collection lends V8TV one of only eleven 1971 Plymouth Hemi Cuda convertibles ever built, and host Kevin finally gets the drive commenters say he has been owed for a while. Between a documented 3.5 million dollar auction result for a sibling car and a sharp-eyed viewer spotting real rust in the tailpipe, this episode of Muscle Car Of The Week turns a routine drive into something closer to an event. What does it actually feel like to finally get behind the wheel of the car everyone calls the top fish?
Chrysler’s Imperial spent 1969 through 1973 as the longest postwar personal luxury car short of a limousine, and it hid some genuinely strange engineering under all that sheet metal, including the first four-wheel anti-lock braking system offered on an American car and a vinyl roof that mysteriously faded into a purple paisley pattern. The G4 Imperial is far more interesting than its sales figures suggest.