Chevrolet Camaro 1968 – Life with Lucy

The 1968 Camaro was Chevrolet’s second-year answer to a strong debut, refining the formula rather than reinventing it — and one of the biggest changes was tucked under the hood, not on the body panels. A new mid-tier big-block option slotted between the softer and wildest 396 tunes, turning the Camaro into a genuine muscle car contender. Here’s what made 1968 a pivotal year for the model, radio or no radio.

Lucy still doesn’t have a radio, but that’s OK.. she has a Big Block under the hood!!

She doesn’t have a radio, but nobody who’s driven a big-block first-generation Camaro has ever really missed one — the exhaust note tends to fill that particular silence just fine. The 396 big-block itself wasn’t new for 1968 — it had been terrorizing Camaro SS buyers since late 1966 — but Chevrolet filled in the missing middle of the lineup that year with a genuinely new engine option, and it turned what was already a strong seller into something even more dangerous on a drag strip. Sales climbed by 14,241 units that year, proof buyers noticed. What actually changed under the hood between 1967 and 1968, and why did it matter so much?

⚑ Featured Gear

Start Car Conversations →

As an Amazon Associate I earn from qualifying purchases.

The Missing Middle Chevy Added for 1968

The 325-horsepower L35 and the serious 375-horsepower L78 had both been available in the Camaro SS since the 396 big-block first showed up partway through the 1967 model year. What Chevrolet actually added for 1968 was the missing middle: a 350-horsepower L34 that split the difference between them, giving buyers a genuine choice instead of just mild or wild. A small handful of L78 cars, roughly 270 units, received special-order aluminum cylinder heads and picked up the L89 designation, though the horsepower rating stayed the same on paper.

A Second Year Built on Small Fixes

Styling carried over largely unchanged from 1967, but big-block SS models got their own visual cues, including chrome hood inserts styled to look like velocity stacks and a low-gloss black rear tail panel — small details that let onlookers know a big-block sat under the hood before the engine ever turned over.

Underneath, Chevrolet addressed real complaints from the first model year: staggered rear shock mounting cut down on wheel hop under hard acceleration, and higher-performance cars swapped to multi-leaf rear springs instead of the single-leaf setup that had struggled to handle big-block torque. Camaro sales jumped by 14,241 units to 235,147 for 1968, evidence the refinements worked. A big-block car like this one, radio or not, represents the model at the point it fully came into its own.

Share your thoughts in the comments below.

Republished by Blog Post Promoter