Chevrolet had an El Camino prototype drawn up in 1952 and then let it sit untouched for seven years. What finally pushed it into production was watching Ford get rewarded for the same idea. The car that resulted wore Bel Air trim over a Biscayne interior, carried a corrugated steel bed floor, and in its hottest form ran a 14-second quarter with a tri-carb 348 under the hood. Two model years later it was gone. Read on to find out what killed it.
Chevrolet had this thing sketched out in 1952 and then did absolutely nothing with it for seven years. What finally pulled the project off the shelf was not a flash of design brilliance or some breakthrough in customer research. It was watching a competitor get to the idea first and get paid handsomely for it. When Chevrolet finally answered, they did it with tail fins so aggressive that owners complained the back end went light at speed, with a bed floor made of corrugated steel instead of wood, and with a factory engine option that would run the quarter mile in fourteen seconds flat. Two model years later the whole thing was cancelled. The reason why is stranger than the car.
The Seven-Year Wait That Ford Finally Ended
Chevrolet had a car-based pickup in the planning stages as early as 1952, and then shelved it. The idea sat dormant until Ford introduced the Ranchero for 1957 and proved there was a real market for a passenger car that hauled. Chevrolet dusted off the concept, accelerated it, and had the El Camino in dealerships for the 1959 model year. The response was immediate. In that first year the El Camino actually outsold the Ranchero it had been created to chase, which is a rare thing for a car that arrived two full model years late to a segment. That opening success is a big part of why the model’s abrupt end still surprises people who only know the later Chevelle-based cars.
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A Station Wagon Hiding Under the Sheet Metal
Underneath, the 1959 El Camino was not a truck in any meaningful sense. It rode on a 119-inch wheelbase and was built on a modified version of the two-door Brookwood station wagon platform, which puts it squarely in passenger car territory. The chassis was the Safety Girder X-frame design riding on full coil suspension at all four corners, and depending on which suspension stiffness and drivetrain combination a buyer chose, rated load capacity ran anywhere from 650 to roughly 1,150 pounds. The bed was lined with corrugated steel sheet rather than the wood deck Chevrolet used in its conventional pickups, a detail that trips up restorers who assume every hauler of the era got planks.
The Air Suspension Option Almost Nobody Should Have Checked
The strangest item on the 1959 order sheet was the Level Air suspension system, which stayed on the El Camino order sheet for both 1959 and 1960 before disappearing from the Chevrolet catalog for good. Almost nobody checked the box, and the ones who did found out why: air suspension in 1959 was ambitious engineering sold to buyers who had no realistic way to maintain it. Lines hardened, bags leaked, compressors failed, and dealers had neither the training nor the parts pipeline to keep the systems alive. A great many air-equipped cars of this era were converted to conventional coils by their second or third owner, which is exactly why an original, functioning Level Air car is such a curiosity at shows today.
Bel Air on the Outside, Biscayne on the Inside
The trim strategy is one of the more interesting things about the first-generation car. Externally the El Camino carried the same brightwork as the mid-level Bel Air, which gave it a genuinely upscale look for something with an open bed hanging off the back. Step inside, though, and the appointments were closer to the entry-level Biscayne. That combination, dressy outside and plain inside, was deliberate. The bed made it a work vehicle on paper, so Chevrolet kept the interior cheap and durable. But because it sat on the full-size platform, essentially any powertrain available in any full-size Chevrolet product could be ordered in it, and that is where things get interesting.
Those Fins Were an Engineering Problem, Not Just a Style
The styling was not universally loved. When the model first hit showrooms there was real controversy over the enormous 1959 tail fins, and the complaints were not purely aesthetic. Owners and reviewers reported that the rear end seemed to float at highway speed, and the horizontal fin treatment combined with the light rear of an unloaded bed did the car no favors aerodynamically. This was peak General Motors excess, the same year the Impala wore cat’s-eye taillights and the Cadillac fins reached their absolute high-water mark, so the El Camino was very much a product of its exact moment rather than an outlier.
Ramjet 283s, Tri-Power 348s, and a 14-Second Quarter
The engine catalog is what keeps collectors interested. The performance options included a 283-cubic-inch Turbo-Fire V8 with either two-barrel or four-barrel carburetion, plus a Ramjet fuel-injected version of that same engine rated at 290 horsepower. Above that sat the 348-cubic-inch Turbo-Thrust in two forms, one with a single four-barrel and the top version running solid lifters and a triple two-barrel carburetor setup good for 315 horsepower, or 235 kW. Bolted to a four-speed, that tri-power 348 El Camino would run 0 to 60 in roughly 7.0 seconds and turn a 14-second quarter mile at around 100 mph with drag gears fitted. Geared for top speed instead, the car was capable of about 130 mph.
1960: The Fins Come Down and the Drama Goes With Them
For 1960 the basic architecture carried over but the styling calmed down considerably. The lines were recognizably the same, but the rear fins were far less pronounced, giving the second-year car a noticeably more conservative and, to many eyes, more resolved appearance. The exterior trim continued to follow the Bel Air, while the interior remained Biscayne-grade with cloth and vinyl seating offered in gray, blue, or green, over a black vinyl floor covering. The engine choices largely carried over, minus the fuel-injected option, and the entry-level V8 took a small dip in rated horsepower in exchange for better fuel economy.
Why It Died After Two Years, and What Happened Next
Then it stopped. Ford had answered the first-generation El Camino with a smaller, cheaper Ranchero built on the compact Falcon platform, and that car simply made more sense to the buyers both companies were fighting over. El Camino sales fell well short of projections for 1960, and Chevrolet pulled the model from the lineup while its engineers reconsidered the whole concept. The revised answer arrived for 1964 on the mid-size Chevelle A-body, and that version ran, with interruptions, all the way to 1987. That leaves the 1959 and 1960 cars as a two-year oddity: the only full-size El Caminos ever built, with the wildest styling of any of them. The 1959 in particular commands a premium for those fins, and a documented tri-power 348 car is genuinely rare, in part because so many of these were actually used as trucks and simply worn out.
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I have never owned a car/pickup, but my late nephew, Craig, bought a new ’86 El Camino with a 305, all power accessories, he pampered the truck with meticulous maintenance, but drove it daily as his work truck(electrical technician on fire suppression systems.)
In abnout 2008 he was broadsided by an impatient driver trying to pass as he signaled for and made a left hand turn. He died suddenly in ’14. It wa a very nice vehicle for all the years hedrove it.