Chevrolet Nova 1970 Street Machine

This 1970 Chevrolet Nova wears a modern LS swap and carbon fiber accents, but the platform underneath was already capable of serious performance straight from the factory — Chevrolet’s own 396-badged, actually 402-cubic-inch, big block was available for just $475 that year. Read on to find out what Chevrolet’s engineers offered buyers before anyone thought to drop in an LS.

Whoever built this 1970 Nova didn’t just modernize it, they gutted the entire relationship between the car and its era, dropping a modern LS engine where a 350 or 396 Turbo-Jet big block used to live and finishing the swap with carbon fiber accents no assembly line in 1970 could have imagined. The body underneath all that custom work, though, is pure late-Sixties Chevrolet, a compact built to fight the Ford Falcon and Plymouth Valiant that somehow ended up wearing a Super Sport badge. Nova buyers in 1970 could already order something close to what this build chases, straight from the factory floor, no aftermarket swap required. So what exactly did Chevrolet’s own engineers give them, before anyone thought to drop in an LS?

Chevrolet’s Answer to a Compact Car Craze

Chevrolet built the first-generation Chevy II/Nova as a fast, pragmatic response to the Ford Falcon and Plymouth Valiant/Dodge Dart, compact cars that were pulling sales away from GM’s unconventional rear-engine Corvair. What started as a straightforward economy car gradually grew teeth through the 1960s, and by 1970 the Nova SS had grown into a genuine performance option in its own right, no longer just a footnote next to Chevrolet’s bigger Chevelle and Camaro performance offerings. That growth mirrored a broader industry trend of compact economy cars gradually absorbing performance options originally reserved for larger models, as manufacturers realized buyers wanted both practicality and speed in the same package.

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A 350 or a 402 Wearing a 396 Badge

By 1970, buyers could order a 350 producing 300 horsepower, or step up to the 396-badged big block — actually bored to 402 cubic inches under the numbers game Chevrolet played with engine names that year — in 350- or 375-horsepower tune, backed by dual exhaust, power front brakes, a simulated hood air intake, and 14×7 wheels wrapped in E70-14 white-stripe tires. Chevrolet kept the ‘396’ badge on a genuinely larger engine purely for marketing continuity, a common trick across the industry as displacement crept upward without the model name catching up.

A 475-Dollar Ticket to a 402 Turbo-Jet

The SS 396 option package cost just 475 dollars on top of a Nova that started at only 2,254 dollars, making it one of the cheapest ways into serious Chevrolet horsepower in 1970. Of the 274,344 Novas Chevrolet built that year, just over 19,000 left the factory with the SS package, and 1970 turned out to be the model’s last year with a big-block engine on the order sheet, since a 350-cubic-inch small block became the top option starting in 1971.

Small Car, Big Engine Bay

The Nova’s compact dimensions were exactly what made it such a compelling platform for stuffing in a genuinely large engine — the same lightweight, simple architecture that made it cheap to build also made it easy to drop big-block power into without the weight penalty a full-size Chevrolet would have carried. That fundamental formula, small car plus big engine, is precisely why builders keep returning to this platform decades later for exactly the kind of custom project this particular Nova represents. Builders today still cite that same lightweight unibody-adjacent structure as the reason a first-generation Nova can handle serious horsepower without the chassis reinforcement a larger car would require.

Where Custom Builds Like This One Fit In

Modern LS-swapped Novas exist because the platform underneath is small, light, and simple enough to accept almost any engine a builder wants to drop in, carbon fiber accents and molded bodywork included. It’s a different approach than Chevrolet’s own 1970 engineers took, relying on factory big-blocks rather than a modern crate engine, but the same basic instinct: take a compact economy car and turn it into something that can embarrass bigger, more expensive machinery at a stoplight.

Why the LS Swap Became So Popular

GM’s LS-family V8s became the go-to swap engine for exactly this kind of project because of their compact external dimensions relative to their power output, combined with genuinely excellent aftermarket support for wiring, engine mounts, and accessory drives. A platform as old as the first-generation Nova was never engineered around a modern fuel-injected V8, but the LS family’s dimensions make the swap dramatically more straightforward than trying to shoehorn most other modern engines into the same factory engine bay.

Carbon Fiber Accents Weren’t an Option in 1970

Nothing about carbon fiber trim existed as a factory option on any 1970 Nova — the material wasn’t remotely practical for mass-produced cars at the time, which makes those accents purely a modern builder’s signature rather than any kind of period-correct restoration choice. That’s part of what separates a build like this from a numbers-matching restoration — it’s explicitly not trying to look like it rolled off the factory floor in 1970.

The SS Package Buyers Actually Chose

Roughly 19,000 SS buyers in 1970 had to choose between the smaller 350 and the larger, pricier 402-badged-as-396 big block, and plenty went with the small-block simply because it was cheaper to insure and easier to live with day to day. That split between small-block and big-block SS Novas is part of what makes surviving big-block cars, in original factory condition, meaningfully rarer today than the total SS production number alone would suggest.

Molded Bodywork and a Custom Color

Beyond the engine swap, builds like this typically involve extensive bodywork — shaved trim, molded seams, and custom paint that a factory assembly line in 1970 would never have produced on a standard Nova SS. That level of fabrication work often represents more total labor hours than the engine swap itself, even though the drivetrain tends to get most of the attention from onlookers at a car show. That fabrication work is often invisible in photos but immediately obvious to anyone who sees the car in person.

A Compact That Refuses to Age Out

Fifty years after Chevrolet built the Nova to fight off the Falcon and Valiant, the platform is still getting reinvented by builders who see the same basic appeal the original engineers did: small, light, and ready for whatever engine someone wants to drop in. Share your thoughts in the comments below.

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