Chevy Snuck a Corvette Engine Into the 1966 Nova SS — Then Pulled It From the Order Sheet a Year Later

Chevrolet quietly offered a 350-horsepower, Corvette-rated 327 in the humble 1966 Chevy II Nova SS. One year later the option vanished almost entirely. Here’s why documented survivors now outsell nearly every other Nova on the market.

Chevrolet dealers in 1966 didn’t advertise it. There was no factory brochure shouting about a compact family car that could humiliate a GTO at a stoplight. But buy a stripped-down Chevy II Nova SS and check the right box on the order sheet, and you got a 327-cubic-inch V8 rated at 350 horsepower — the same hydraulic-cam small block Chevrolet had been dropping into Corvettes a year earlier. It was the fastest, most dangerous-feeling car in the Chevy II lineup, and almost nobody outside the dealership floor knew it existed. A year later, the option was gone. Chevrolet pulled it from the order sheet for 1967, with only a handful of special-order exceptions ever built, and the car that remains is one of the rarest sleepers of the entire muscle car era.

The Engine Chevrolet Borrowed Straight From the Corvette

The option code was L79, and it wasn’t a watered-down version of anything. Chevrolet introduced the L79 327/350 in 1965 as a slightly tamer, hydraulic-lifter cousin of the fire-breathing L76 — the 365-horsepower Corvette-only V8 that used a mechanical camshaft and demanded constant valve adjustments. The L79 kept most of the L76’s bite but swapped in hydraulic lifters, making it far more livable on the street while still pulling nearly identical numbers on paper. For 1966, Chevrolet offered that same engine in the compact Chevy II Nova SS, a car that most buyers were cross-shopping against Falcons and Valiants, not Corvettes.

Dropping a 350-horsepower Corvette engine into a car that weighed barely 3,000 pounds turned the little Nova into one of the quickest machines General Motors built that year, pound for pound. The Nova SS already wore bucket seats, a center console, and SS badging as part of its trim package — the same dress-up pieces buyers could get with far tamer engines underneath, including sixes and smaller-displacement V8s for shoppers who just wanted the look. What the L79 added wasn’t visual. It was the one thing a casual onlooker couldn’t see from the curb: a motor that would walk away from cars twice the Nova’s price the moment the light turned green.

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Where the Nova Fit Next to Detroit’s Bigger Muscle Cars

1966 was the year the muscle car wars were accelerating in every direction. Pontiac’s GTO had already proven a mid-size car with a big-block engine could be a sales phenomenon, Ford was pushing the Mustang into fastback performance trims, and Chevrolet’s own Chevelle SS was closing in on big-block territory. The Nova SS L79 competed in none of those conversations directly — it wasn’t marketed as a muscle car rival to any of them, and its compact body and modest small-block displacement kept it out of the magazine shootouts that made the GTO and the Mustang household names. That’s precisely why it flew under the radar for decades. Builders chasing a genuine engine-swap curiosity have gone the other direction entirely in recent years — one shop even dropped an LS, a Hemi, and a Coyote into the same Plymouth Duster to settle an engine debate once and for all — but the 1966 Nova SS never needed a modern swap to make its case. It left the factory as the giant-killer, no transplant required.

That obscurity is also what makes the car’s story worth telling now. Most muscle car history gets rehashed around the same half-dozen icons every year. The L79 Nova is a reminder that some of the era’s most interesting performance stories happened quietly, in a showroom corner nobody was watching, on an order form most buyers never read past the trim-level boxes.

Inside a dealership showroom, the Nova SS package itself was cheap by comparison to anything Pontiac or Ford were charging for genuine performance trim — it layered in exterior badging, the console, and upgraded upholstery without demanding a buyer spend GTO money to get it. That affordability is part of why the L79 option mattered so much: for a relatively small premium over a base SS, a buyer walked away with a car that could run with machines costing substantially more. It’s also why so few people ordered it. Most Nova SS buyers in 1966 wanted the look, not the risk of a 350-horsepower small block in a light, short-wheelbase car with drum brakes doing most of the stopping. The ones who did check that box got something genuinely rare, and mostly didn’t know it at the time.

Why the 350-HP Option Vanished After Just One Year

Production numbers for the 1966 L79 Nova SS are murky even among specialists — auction houses and classic car dealers have cited figures ranging from roughly 3,500 to just over 5,400 depending on how the count is defined, with the tighter estimate landing around 3,547 SS cars built with the L79 option specifically. What isn’t in dispute is what happened next: for 1967, Chevrolet dropped the 350-horsepower L79 from the Chevy II order sheet entirely, aside from a small number of special-order cars that reportedly slipped through. The Nova got a facelift for 1967 — its last year on that second-generation body — but the engine that had made the SS genuinely dangerous was gone almost as quickly as it arrived.

That one-year window is exactly what makes a surviving, documented L79 Nova SS so significant today. Because the option disappeared so fast, and because Chevy II paperwork from the era was never tracked with the same rigor as full-size Chevrolet or Corvette records, verifying a genuine L79 car has become its own small industry. Buyers are routinely warned to check casting numbers, date codes, and factory documentation before trusting a seller’s word — a caution serious enough that it shows up repeatedly in auction listings and collector guides written specifically about this car.

A Sleeper That Still Catches Collectors Off Guard

Part of what makes the L79 Nova story worth revisiting now is how differently the car reads next to its showier muscle car contemporaries. There’s no massive hood scoop, no stripe package screaming for attention, no name recognition on the level of a GTO or a Chevelle SS. It’s a compact economy car with subtle SS trim that happened to carry, for exactly one model year, an engine good enough to run with cars that cost far more. That contrast — unassuming shape, Corvette-grade output — is the entire reason collectors chase documented examples today, and why an unverified “L79 clone” sells for a fraction of a car with the paperwork to back it up.

The rarity also means most enthusiasts have never seen one in person, let alone heard one running. A factory L79 Nova SS pulling away from a stoplight sounds and feels nothing like the compact economy car its silhouette suggests, which is exactly the gap Chevrolet’s own engineers were exploiting before the option quietly disappeared from the order sheet. It’s the kind of car that rewrites a bystander’s assumptions in about four seconds flat.

What a Real One Is Worth Today

Documented L79 Nova SS cars have sold across a wide band depending on condition, mileage, and paperwork. Recent auction results have landed anywhere from the mid-$50,000s to well over $75,000 for well-documented, lower-mileage examples, with at least one high-condition car reportedly climbing even higher. Among Chevy IIs and Novas of any year, only the ultra-rare Yenko and COPO-built cars consistently bring more money than a genuine 1966 L79 SS — a remarkable place in the hierarchy for a car most of the muscle car world has never heard of, built around an engine that lasted exactly one model year before Chevrolet pulled it from the books.

For a car that never got a magazine shootout or a factory ad campaign built around its horsepower, that’s a quiet kind of vindication — proof that the fastest car on a 1966 Chevrolet lot wasn’t always the one wearing the biggest badge.

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