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American Motors built the Ambassador as its flagship for eighteen model years, and 1966 was the year the gamble finally paid off, with sales climbing to roughly 71,000 from under 19,000 just two years earlier. The DPL hardtop sat at the very top of that range with reclining buckets and AMC’s largest V8. Here is why an unrestored survivor from a brand this overlooked is genuinely harder to find than a big-name muscle car.
A 1957 Ford Custom 300 called 700 Proof wears a moonshine-runner theme on the outside and a supercharged modern Ford V8 underneath, and the name is a dyno number, not a joke. Almost nothing about the build is what it appears to be at a glance, from the hood scoop to the wheels to the head design bolted under the blower. Read on to find out what is actually hiding under that plain-looking paint.
Calling this an awesome Chevy truck undersells what actually changed underneath it. 1965 was the year Chevrolet quietly rewrote the rulebook for its half-ton line, adding a 327 V8 to the C10 order sheet and offering factory in-dash air conditioning on a vehicle otherwise fitted with a vinyl bench and a column shifter. None of it shows in the sheetmetal. Here is what separates a 1965 short wide bed from the trucks that came just before it.
This replica sounds fantastic, but the original 1955 Porsche 550 Spyder it’s copying has a story darker than any muscle car legend. James Dean owned his for nine days before it killed him, and the wreckage that survived went missing decades ago despite a standing million-dollar reward. Here’s the real history behind the car everyone still calls ‘Little Bastard.’
Jay Leno’s garage holds hundreds of cars, but only a handful made the cut when The Drive asked him to name his American muscle favorites. The list runs from an expected numbers-matching Hemi Challenger to a reworked Oldsmobile Toronado throwing over 1,000 horsepower at its rear wheels — proof that even a career car collector’s favorites can still surprise.
A V8-powered chainsaw sounds like the kind of thing only a muscle car fanatic would build in a garage — until you learn the record for cutting speed belongs to a company on the other side of the world. From a 508-pound Buick-powered monster nicknamed ‘The Predator’ to an Australian saw built purely for marketing, these builds prove a V8 will make anything sound like it belongs on a drag strip.
Two Highland Green Mustangs were built for the chase scene in Bullitt, and for fifty years the accepted story was that only one survived. Both turned out to be alive. This is what Ford actually put in an S-code 390 GT fastback, what Max Balchowsky changed before the cameras rolled, how fast these cars really were once the stopwatch came out, and what happened when the hero car finally crossed an auction block in 2020.
The 1969 Plymouth Road Runner was the year the budget muscle car formula worked exactly as intended, and 84,420 buyers proved it. Behind the cartoon horn sat an exclusive 383 four-barrel making 335 horsepower, built from parts borrowed off the far more expensive 440. Here is what Plymouth actually did to that engine, why air-conditioned cars got a different one, and what separates a real 383 four-speed car from a badge job today.
GM’s 1971 switch to low-lead fuel dropped the Buick 455’s compression from 10.0:1 to 8.5:1, and the Stage 1 rating fell from 360 horsepower to 345. Buick built the car anyway, with a hotter camshaft, larger valves, a recalibrated Quadrajet and 3.42 Positraction as standard, and roughly 81 of them left the factory as convertibles. Period tests still recorded mid-13-second quarter miles. Read on for what a genuine Stage 1 has to prove before you write the check.
Buick built well over a hundred thousand Special sedans for 1953, and yet this ordinary four-door quietly marked the end of an engine era nobody at the time realized was closing. A brand-new V8 was already going into more than half of Buick’s output that year, just not into this car. Here is why Buick held its most affordable model back, and what else changed underneath in the same twelve months.
A 1960 Chevrolet Impala convertible in Ermine White carries an engine option so rare that one longtime fan estimates only a few hundred were built this way: the 348 Tri-Power, three two-barrel carburetors feeding a car most buyers ordered with a single four-barrel instead. Volo Auto Museum’s Brian Grams walks through this loaded survivor with My Car Story host Lou Costabile, and the story it tells — from Sydney to a car show price tag decades later — says a lot about how these cars are valued today. Watch to see what made this one worth keeping.
Somewhere in America sits a single 1965 Chevelle convertible that Chevrolet built completely differently from every other Malibu on the lot, and for decades most people who saw it had no idea why. Chevy had a new big-block ready to show off and, rather than quietly bolt it into a few cars, engineers built an entire limited package around it. Only 201 were made, and fewer than eighty are believed to survive.
Chevrolet spent most of 1964 insisting it did not need a Mustang rival, then spent the next two years building one in a hurry. The 1967 Camaro arrived on an all-new F-body platform with everything from a 140-horsepower six to a 375-horsepower 396, plus a homologation special called the Z/28 that only 602 buyers ever received. Here is what made the first year the one collectors still chase hardest.
A nicely restored 1979 Ford F150 4×4 with the 351 V8 sits in a smaller corner of the market than most people assume, because the four-wheel-drive V8 combination was never the volume seller. This was the last year of an entire F-Series generation, riding on a front suspension design Ford had already trusted for fourteen years. Read on to find out why that suspension stuck around so long and what makes this configuration worth seeking out.
By 1965 Chevrolet had already solved the question of how to make a Corvette go fast. The harder problem was stopping it, and the four-wheel disc brakes that arrived that year were so far beyond the drums they replaced that Chevrolet offered buyers a cash credit to refuse them. Almost nobody took it. Then, in March, a 396 big block appeared on the order sheet and changed the conversation entirely. Here is what made 1965 the pivotal Sting Ray year.