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This piece imagined a future where cars drove themselves and the real money went to companies nobody thinks of as automotive: chipmakers, mapmakers, data brokers. Years later, names like Mobileye, Nvidia, and Waymo prove the theory more right than wrong. Here’s how that unlikely list of winners actually played out.
When the camouflage came off the Camaro ZL1 1LE at the Nurburgring, Chevrolet was chasing a number that had stood for six years and belonged to a Dodge. The 1LE package pairs 650 supercharged horsepower with a manual gearbox, spool-valve dampers borrowed from endurance racing and tyres that barely qualify as street legal. How close did it get to the Viper? Read on for the lap time and the hardware behind it.
Mark Lieberman spent three years talking an Ohio owner into selling a Tucker ’48 that had sat since 1982 with barely 8,000 miles on the odometer. Only 51 of these cars were ever built, and 47 are known to survive today, which is part of why one sold for nearly $3 million in 2013. Read on to find out how this particular barn find compares to every other Tucker Lieberman has restored.
Jay Leno owns hundreds of cars, but few tell a story as understated as his 1966 Dodge Coronet, a boxy family coupe hiding one of the most feared engines Detroit ever sold to the public. That small “426 Hemi” fender badge marks the first model year Chrysler offered the Hemi as a genuine street engine rather than a race-only exotic, sold in just three B-body nameplates. Read on to find out why a car this plain-looking still commands serious respect from collectors like Leno.
Restore a Corvette too close to perfect and purists call foul; restore it too loose and you lose the numbers-matching value collectors chase. This decades-old argument over Corvette restoration standards, factory-correct versus “better than Detroit ever made it,” still splits owners today. Read on for both sides of a debate that has no clean answer, and the questions that help you pick your own.
A small Wisconsin shop turned heads at SEMA by building classic Mopars with body panels made almost entirely of carbon fiber — hoods, fenders, even fender flares, shaving roughly 600 pounds off cars already packing supercharged Hemi power. SpeedKore’s builds have since gone from show-floor curiosities to Kevin Hart’s personal fleet, a Fast & Furious movie car, and an actual Dodge parts catalog. Here’s how a carbon-fiber gimmick became one of the most respected names in modern muscle car building.
A black and gold Pontiac Firebird Trans Am built in the image of Smokey and the Bandit sold for $275,000 at Barrett-Jackson in Scottsdale, and Burt Reynolds drove it onto the block himself. It was not the first one he sold, and it was nowhere near the last. The car underneath the paint had almost nothing in common with a 1977 Trans Am. Read on for what buyers were really paying for.
Yenko’s name has not meant much on a new car in decades, but a modern stroker build on the Chevrolet Corvette Grand Sport just brought it roaring back. With a supercharged 6.8-liter making roughly 800 horsepower, wrapped in Grand Sport hardware and genuine Yenko styling cues, only fifty of these were ever built. Read on to find out what’s actually under the skin.
Troy LaCrone made his name with a nitrous small-block 1971 Camaro that ran 9.19 at over 140 mph while still riding on leaf springs and slapper bars, a car that looked eight seconds slower than it was. Asked whether he would keep chasing quicker numbers, he said he hoped not. He later posted a 7.7730 average at Hot Rod Drag Week and beat JJ Da Boss on television. Read on for how that progression actually happened.
Ford’s Mustang beat the Camaro and Challenger for a fifth straight month in March 2017, extending a streak to 27 wins in 29 months, but the raw sales totals hid a steep year-over-year decline. This piece unpacks the numbers behind that streak, why Camaro and Challenger were actually closing the gap underneath it, and what a winning streak built on a shrinking base actually signals.
In 2017 the rumor mill had a specific target: a 2019 Dodge Barracuda that would replace the aging Challenger with something smaller, lighter and built on Alfa Romeo underpinnings. It never happened. What Dodge actually did with the Challenger over the following six years turned out to be far stranger than the rumor, and the Barracuda name is still sitting unused. Here is where the story came from and how it really ended.
On a recent episode of “Jay Leno’s Garage,” appraiser Donald Osborne challenged Leno to guess which of three unrestored classics had appreciated the most — and even Leno got it wrong. The reveal says a lot about how collectors actually value originality over polish, a lesson echoed by Ralph Lauren’s own decades of collecting and by the crowds still showing up to events like the Daytona Turkey Run. Read on to see why the roughest-looking car in the lineup won.
Barrett-Jackson’s 2017 Northeast auction at Mohegan Sun led with a 1971 Dodge Hemi Challenger R/T and a pair of 1970 Plymouth ‘Cudas, and the production figures behind those cars explain the interest better than any catalog description. Chrysler built just 71 Hemi Challenger R/T hardtops for 1971, and fewer than 800 Hemi ‘Cudas across the model’s entire life. Read on for what those numbers mean and why documentation now decides the price.
Chevrolet needed a new face for its NASCAR Cup Series program after the SS sedan went out of production, so it turned to the Camaro ZL1 — a nameplate every enthusiast recognizes, attached to a race car that shares nothing with the road version. Underneath sits the same tube-frame chassis and pushrod V8 the SS ran. The gamble paid off in the very first race. Read on to find out how the swap actually worked, and why the problem came back around.
Three days isn’t nearly enough time to see everything Chrysler ever built parked in one place, but the Mopar Nationals crowd tries anyway. Held at a drag strip with roots along the old National Road, the event has grown into one of the largest single-marque gatherings in the country. Read on to find out what keeps it growing after nearly four decades.