Chevrolet’s Own General Manager Joked the Camaro Was Built to ‘Eat Mustangs’ — Nobody Ever Topped That Line

Chevrolet invented a fake French translation to explain the Camaro’s name back in 1966, and the story never really went away. From a rule-dodging Z/28 engine to a Hollywood robot that revived the whole nameplate, here’s what fifty-eight years of Camaro actually adds up to.

On June 28, 1966, Chevrolet general manager Pete Estes got on a coast-to-coast conference call with roughly 200 reporters to announce the name of GM’s answer to the Ford Mustang. When someone asked what “Camaro” actually meant, Estes didn’t have a real translation, so he gave them one anyway: it was old French slang, he said, for “a small, vicious animal that eats Mustangs.” No French dictionary has ever backed that up. It didn’t matter. The line was funny and cutting enough that Chevrolet kept repeating it for decades, and it set the tone for a rivalry that’s still getting argued about in YouTube comment sections nearly sixty years later. The car underneath the joke turned out to be just as serious as the name was silly, and it’s worth understanding what fifty-eight years of Camaro actually built.

This rundown comes from Donut Media’s long-running Up To Speed series, the channel’s format for compressing the full history of an iconic car into one tightly paced episode. The series has covered everything from the Supra to the Miata, and its Camaro episode leans into exactly the kind of origin-story absurdity — a fake French insult, a leaked internal code name, a General Motors executive cracking jokes on a nationwide call — that makes the nameplate’s history more interesting than a simple spec sheet.

It’s also, unsurprisingly, one of the most-watched entries in the series, which tracks: the Camaro-versus-Mustang argument has never really gone away, and every generation of the car has added a new chapter to it. Commenters keep coming back to two things in particular — the name-origin story, and the car’s unlikely second life as a Hollywood robot, which we’ll get to.

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A Rushed Answer to a Panic Chevy Didn’t See Coming

Chevrolet was caught flat-footed by the Mustang’s 1964 launch, and the Camaro was the result of a scramble to catch up. The car Estes announced in June 1966 didn’t reach dealers until September 29 of that year, badged as a 1967 model, following press previews in Detroit and Los Angeles and a public unveiling on September 26. It shared its rear-wheel-drive F-body platform and most of its major mechanical components with the Pontiac Firebird, which launched the same model year as GM’s second swing at the pony car market Ford had just invented.

The first-year Camaro didn’t even come with a big-block engine at launch. The SS 396, which became the car’s signature big-block option, was added as a running change partway through the 1967 model year. What did arrive at launch, and matters more to the car’s reputation today, was the Z/28.

The Z/28’s 302 Was Built to Dodge a Rulebook

Chevrolet performance engineer Vince Piggins built the Z/28’s engine to get around a rule, not to make a street car faster. The SCCA’s new Trans-American Sedan Championship capped engine displacement at 305 cubic inches, and Chevrolet didn’t have anything that fit — its small blocks came in 283 and 327 cubic inches, with nothing in between. Piggins’s fix was to combine the 327’s 4.00-inch bore with the 283’s 3.00-inch stroke crankshaft, landing at 302.4 cubic inches. Chevrolet officially rated it at a conservative 290 horsepower; most sources agree the real number was well north of 300. It was never offered in anything but the Z/28, and only for three model years, 1967 through 1969.

The Z/28 was Chevrolet’s homologation special, but the rarest first-generation Camaros were something else entirely: the 1969 COPO cars, ordered through a dealer-invoice loophole originally meant for fleet and taxi orders. COPO 9560 brought an all-aluminum 427 officially rated at 430 horsepower, though real output is generally believed to have been closer to 500. Chevrolet built only 69 of them, largely at the request of a single Illinois dealer, Fred Gibb Chevrolet, which ended up unable to sell all the units it had ordered.

The Car Nearly Died, Then a Movie Robot Saved It

The Camaro’s peak on paper came a decade after the Z/28 debuted, in 1979, when Chevrolet built 282,571 of them — still the best single sales year in the nameplate’s history, with the Z28 trim alone accounting for nearly 85,000 of those. That momentum didn’t last. When the third-generation Camaro arrived for 1982 on a smaller, more fuel-efficient platform, Chevrolet leaned on its motorsports ties to keep the car relevant, badging a 1985 Z28 option package as the IROC-Z after GM’s long-running sponsorship of the International Race of Champions series. The IROC-Z’s optional tuned-port-injected 5.0-liter V8 made a modest 215 horsepower and 275 lb-ft of torque, but it kept the Camaro’s performance reputation alive through the leaner years of the 1980s.

By the early 2000s, the pony car war Chevrolet had joked its way into wasn’t paying off anymore. Camaro sales had collapsed, and the fourth generation went out with just 42,098 units built across the 2002 model year before Chevrolet closed the book, building the last one on August 27, 2002. There was no fifth generation waiting in the wings — the Camaro simply stopped existing for seven years.

What brought it back wasn’t a sales chart. It was a movie. Michael Bay’s 2007 “Transformers” cast a Camaro concept, two full years before Chevrolet had an actual production car to sell, as Bumblebee. The exposure was enormous. When the real fifth-generation Camaro arrived for the 2010 model year, it inherited a fanbase the marketing department hadn’t had to build itself. Commenters on the Donut Media video still bring up the Bumblebee connection more than almost any other detail, which says something about how much of the Camaro’s modern relevance runs through a Hollywood robot rather than a spec sheet.

What the Camaro’s End (For Now) Actually Means

Chevrolet ended Camaro production in January 2024, closing out the sixth generation after nine years without naming a direct replacement. GM has said the nameplate isn’t gone for good, but company officials have been clear that a revived Camaro is far more likely to be electric than gas-powered, in line with GM’s broader push toward an all-electric passenger lineup. For now, the sixth-generation ZL1 — supercharged, track-focused, built on the same Alpha platform GM used under the Cadillac ATS — stands as the last word from a nameplate that spent fifty-eight years defined by a joke about eating its rival.

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