Two Generations of Chevy’s Car-Truck Idea, Separated by 40 Years

Forty-four years apart, Chevrolet tried to answer the same weird question: what happens when you cross a sports car with a pickup bed? The first answer became a three-decade icon. The second answer looked incredible, packed real horsepower, and still only lasted about three years on the sales floor. Here’s how the El Camino and the SSR actually stack up against each other.

Chevrolet solved the same problem twice, forty-some years apart, and came up with two wildly different answers. The first time, in 1959, the fix was bolting a pickup bed onto a passenger car and calling it a day. The second time, in 2003, GM’s designers reached back into their own history books, borrowed styling cues from their own vintage trucks, and built something nobody had seen before: a retractable hardtop pickup with a Corvette-adjacent V8 under the hood. One of these ideas lasted three decades. The other lasted about three years before GM pulled the plug. So which one actually deserves the “trucklet” crown?

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The Original: A Sedan That Learned to Haul

The El Camino debuted for 1959 on Chevy’s full-size platform, then got downsized onto the Chevelle chassis in 1964, where it stayed through the rest of its run all the way to 1987. A 1970 El Camino SS packing the L34 396 cubic-inch big block made 350 horsepower backed by a Turbo Hydramatic 400 three-speed automatic — genuine muscle car hardware wearing a truck bed, decades before anyone coined the term “trucklet.”

The Retro Revival Nobody Expected

The SSR (Super Sport Roadster) first showed up as a concept at the 2000 Detroit auto show before reaching production for 2003. Designer Brian Baker’s team pulled inspiration straight from Chevy’s 1947-1955 Advance Design pickups and, yes, the El Camino itself, then wrapped it around a retractable hardtop. The first two model years ran GM’s 5.3-liter Vortec LM4 V8 at 300 horsepower, good for 0-60 in 7.7 seconds. In 2005, Chevy swapped in the LS2 V8 for 390 horsepower and a 5.3-second 0-60 with the six-speed manual — a genuinely quick truck by any era’s standards.

The Numbers Tell the Real Story

Total SSR production landed somewhere around 24,150 to 24,180 units before Chevy discontinued it in 2006, a rounding error compared to what the El Camino moved across its 28-year run. That short lifespan is exactly why the SSR has quietly built a cult following today: it was a genuine commercial flop that happened to be quick, distinctive, and increasingly rare, which is a combination collectors love to chase once a car is a couple decades removed from the showroom floor.

Ford Never Stopped Chasing the Same Idea

Chevrolet wasn’t alone in believing a car-truck hybrid could sell. Ford’s own Ranchero beat the El Camino to market by a year in 1957 and stuck around in various forms all the way to 1979, while Dodge and GMC each took their own later swings at the concept with the Rampage and Caballero. None of them matched the El Camino’s staying power, which says something about how well Chevy tuned the formula on its second try with the Chevelle-based redesign.

Why Collectors Treat These Two So Differently

An El Camino SS with big-block power sits comfortably alongside other genuine muscle cars in the collector market, judged by the same numbers-matching standards as a Chevelle SS. The SSR occupies stranger territory – it’s not really a muscle car and not really a work truck, and its value has always come more from novelty and scarcity than from any performance pedigree, which keeps it a curiosity item rather than a blue-chip collectible.

The Retractable Roof Was a Genuine Engineering Risk

Building a pickup with a power retractable hardtop had never been attempted at production scale before the SSR, and GM’s engineers were essentially solving problems nobody else had faced on a truck-based platform. That mechanical complexity is exactly why the SSR turned out to be more expensive to build and trickier to service than a conventional truck, and it’s a big part of why GM’s ambitions for the model cooled so quickly after launch.

Owning a Low-Production Retro Truck Today

Because total SSR production stayed in the tens of thousands rather than the hundreds of thousands, parts availability – especially anything tied to the retractable roof mechanism – can be tighter than owners of more common GM trucks are used to. Anyone shopping for one today should budget for the possibility of tracking down specialty parts or a shop familiar with the roof system, rather than assuming a local GM dealer parts counter can handle everything.

Part of a Bigger Retro Design Wave

The SSR didn’t appear in isolation – it arrived during a stretch when GM and its rivals were leaning hard into nostalgia-driven styling, from the PT Cruiser to the reborn Ford Thunderbird and the new Volkswagen Beetle. Viewed that way, the SSR was Chevrolet’s most literal expression of that trend, borrowing directly from its own 1940s and 1950s trucks and even from the El Camino it eventually shared a showroom history with.

Why GM Never Tried a Third Version

When SSR production ended in 2006, GM never came back for another attempt at a retractable-roof car-truck, which suggests the company viewed the experiment as settled rather than worth revisiting. Whatever lessons GM took from the SSR’s short run, a follow-up model never materialized, leaving it as a one-time detour rather than the start of a new product line.

The El Camino’s Own Quiet Retirement

Chevrolet pulled the plug on the El Camino after the 1987 model year, as the broader car-based pickup segment fell out of favor across the industry. That closed out a nameplate that had already outlasted every rival by a wide margin, making its eventual retirement feel more like the natural end of an era than the abrupt cancellation the SSR experienced less than two decades later.

What Each One Represents to a Different Kind of Collector

An El Camino buyer is usually chasing genuine muscle car credentials in a truck-shaped package, judged by the same big-block, numbers-matching standards as any Chevelle. An SSR buyer is chasing something else entirely – a short-lived, design-forward oddity that never quite found its audience the first time around. Neither car is really competing with the other for the same buyer’s money, which is part of why both have managed to carve out their own small, stable corner of the collector market decades after their respective production runs ended.

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