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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.

Owner Jeffrey Filz grew up two blocks from the Kenosha plant that built this 1970 AMC Javelin SST Mark Donohue Signature Edition, and the comments below Lou Costabile’s video turn up an even wilder story: a commenter’s father, a former Spitfire pilot, briefly owned one himself. Watch the full walkaround and engine start.

Road Test TV lines up two of Chrysler’s rarest factory muscle cars, a 1968 Plymouth Road Runner and a 1968 Dodge Super Bee, both fitted with the legendary 426 Hemi, for a naturally aspirated quarter-mile grudge match. The comments reveal an audience less interested in who wins than in celebrating two genuine Mopar icons running clean 11-second passes. Watch to see how two of Detroit’s most feared engines settle a very friendly family argument.

Pontiac officially rated the 1969 GTO Ram Air IV at 370 horsepower — and deliberately lied about it. This episode of Muscle Car Of The Week features a rare Ram Air IV 400, four-speed GTO convertible from The Brothers Collection, loaded with options seldom seen together. The comments reveal why Pontiac’s real output was closer to 420-430 horsepower, and how an internal weight-to-power directive, aimed at dodging insurance rate hikes, kept the true number off the window sticker. Watch to see the car behind the number that was never supposed to be accurate.

When the California Highway Patrol specified a pursuit car in 1961, the requirement was brutal: 100 miles per hour sustained for a full hour in 100-degree heat, without failure. Jay Leno’s Garage brings in a fully restored 1961 Dodge Polara built to exactly that spec, courtesy of restorers Morgan Yates and Dave Skaien of the Automobile Club of Southern California. The comments add real memories from CHP families and desert truckers who lived through that same era. Watch to see what it actually took to build a car for that job.

A third-generation Camaro doesn’t usually get much respect in muscle car circles, but one owner’s IROC-Z, featured here by The Drive, might be the car that changes that. Built with years of restraint instead of loud mods — factory badging intact, no stripe graphics, only the wheels giving it away — it’s what the crew calls the absolute perfect version of a car most people already wrote off. The comments turn into a flood of childhood memories about parents’ IROCs and Z28s. Watch to see what makes this one different.

Ford built the Boss 351 for exactly one model year before discontinuing the entire Boss lineup — just 1,806 were made. Jeff Ball’s example, finished in Ford’s short-lived Grabber Lime and shown at the Muscle Car and Corvette Nationals in Rosemont, Illinois, is the rare kind of Boss most enthusiasts have only read about. Under the narrow-windowed 1971 bodywork sits a 351 Cleveland V8 that some owners call the quickest of the three Boss Mustangs. Watch to see why this one-year-only Ford still divides opinion decades later.

This 1967 Chevrolet Camaro carries build number N100001 — the very first unit off Chevrolet’s Norwood, Ohio assembly line. Along the way it was stripped down and turned into a race car, a fate that erased the history of countless early Camaros before it. What saved this one was a single decision: whoever converted it kept the original parts instead of scrapping them, making a true, numbers-matching restoration possible decades later. Watch to see how a factory-first Camaro survived its own history.

Cadillac’s Series 62 dropped lower, grew sleeker, and picked up jet-age styling cues every year from 1954 to 1956 — while sales climbed to a record 134,502 units by the end of the run. Read on to see how a three-year styling evolution turned into Cadillac’s best sales stretch of the decade.

Chevrolet took a two-door Chevelle, chopped it behind the B-pillar, and created a truck that didn’t look or drive like one. The second-generation El Camino grew from a mild six-cylinder hauler into a genuine SS396 performer by 1967. Read on to see how a utility vehicle ended up with a 375-horsepower option.

For 1970, Ford promoted Torino to the top of its mid-size lineup and spread it across seventeen different models, from a basic wagon to the 429-only Torino Cobra fastback. Coke-bottle styling, a new competition suspension package, and interior updates reshaped the range from top to bottom. Read on to find out what Motor Trend meant by calling the Cobra “completely different.”

Somewhere in the 1980s, the boxy, sharp-edged shapes that defined an entire generation of American cars quietly disappeared, replaced within about a decade by the curves nearly every car still wears today. Vox traces the shift back to a specific Ford sedan, a wind tunnel, and fuel economy rules that made drag coefficient a bottom-line issue for every automaker. The explanation has almost nothing to do with changing taste.


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