Chevrolet Tried to Hide This Option in 1967 – Only 6 Buyers Ever Got Their Hands on the Nova SS L79

Chevrolet built only a handful of 1967 Nova SS models with the potent L79 327 – a factory sleeper so rare that GM barely acknowledged its own existence. See what made this quiet giant-killer worth six figures today.

In 1967, if you walked into a Chevrolet dealership and asked for the fastest Nova on the lot, the salesman probably pointed you toward the Camaro instead. Chevrolet had quietly buried a hot-rod version of its compact Chevy II — a lightweight, high-compression small-block that could embarrass full-size muscle cars at the stoplight. It never appeared in the official brochure. It was never advertised. By the time the paperwork trail runs dry, historians have only been able to confirm six 1967 Nova SS models that left the factory with this engine under the hood. Today, one of the rarest survivors has been listed with an asking price of $225,000 — more than plenty of exotics from the same era. Here’s the story behind Chevrolet’s quietest giant-killer.

About the Video

The video comes from Cars Archhive, a channel built around deep-dive documentary breakdowns of overlooked muscle car history, and it centers on the 1967 Chevrolet Nova SS equipped with the L79 327 engine. The story it tells is a familiar one in Detroit lore: a genuinely potent engine option that corporate politics kept off the order sheet, available only to buyers who knew exactly which box to check — or who had a connection at the dealership willing to make a phone call.

The video walks through why Chevrolet allegedly wanted to protect the Camaro’s image as the brand’s performance flagship, the underrated horsepower rating GM assigned the small-block to keep it out of insurance company crosshairs, and the unmistakable 1967 Nova styling that let this car hide in plain sight. It’s a sleeper story in the truest sense — a plain two-door body concealing something the factory never wanted broadly advertised.

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The Nova SS L79: A Factory Secret With Real Numbers

The L79 327 wasn’t some myth cooked up by enthusiast forums. Chevrolet built it from 1965 through 1968 and rated it at 350 horsepower at 5,800 rpm with 360 lb-ft of torque at 3,600 rpm, using small-chamber, big-valve heads, an aluminum high-rise intake, and a hydraulic camshaft aggressive enough to make the L79 one of the hottest hydraulic-cam small-blocks Chevrolet ever built. It first showed up as a factory-listed Nova SS option in 1966, when 3,547 of the 20,986 Super Sport Novas built that year left the factory with it — already a meaningfully rare combination.

For 1967, though, Chevrolet didn’t list the L79 as an official Nova SS option at all. The standard SS package started with a 275-horsepower 327 for a base price of $2,683. Buyers who wanted the L79 had to work the system — and by most credible accounts, only about six 1967 Novas ended up with the engine installed, making them dramatically rarer than their already-scarce 1966 counterparts. For readers curious about how factory-built rarities like this stack up against cars modified after the fact, we’ve dug into that exact question in our breakdown of built vs. bought muscle cars — the short answer is that numbers-matching factory rarities like the L79 Nova almost always win the argument.

What Makes It Special

What makes the L79 Nova such an enduring story isn’t just the horsepower number — plenty of 1967 muscle cars made 350 horsepower on paper. It’s the combination of that small-block punch with the Chevy II’s compact, lightweight unibody. Strip away the badges and the L79 Nova looked like any other economy compact idling at the light next to it, right up until the moment the light turned green and a car half the size of a GTO or a big-block Chevelle was suddenly gone. That weight advantage is exactly why these cars developed a reputation as giant-killers among racers who knew what they were looking at.

It’s also why collectors chase surviving examples so aggressively today. A documented, numbers-matching 1967 Nova SS L79 is one of the rarest combinations in the entire Chevy II/Nova family tree, rarer than most of the big-name muscle cars that get all the auction headlines. Six-figure asking prices on well-restored examples reflect just how thin that population really is.

Watch the full video above and let us know your thoughts in the comments.