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Learning to drive a manual transmission used to be a rite of passage for muscle car fans, usually behind the wheel of a hand-me-down or a patient parent’s classic. As stick shifts have all but disappeared from new car lots, that tradition has gotten rarer by the year. Here’s a look at how manual transmissions went from standard equipment to an enthusiast novelty, and why a small comeback might be underway.
This 1964 Chevelle hardtop shows up in fresh red paint, aftermarket five-spoke wheels, and a white bucket-seat interior, clues that point to a full cosmetic restoration rather than a barn find. See what the photos can and cannot confirm about its original trim level, and why first-year Chevelles are drawing renewed attention from collectors today.
A backyard tree-felling job starts exactly by the book — a wedge cut, a truck backed up as insurance, a plan for which way the trunk should fall. Then the tree reverses direction mid-cut, and the truck that was supposed to be backup becomes the target. Viewers have spent years picking apart the exact moment the hinge wood failed. Watch to see how close a few degrees came to the difference between a Tuesday chore and a viral wreck.
RS, SS, and Z28 weren’t just badges on the late-1960s Camaro — they were separate engineering paths that could be stacked, combined, or chosen alone, and the production numbers behind each one tell a story most fans never hear. From a dealer-only 427 swap Chevrolet never officially offered to the year Z28 orders nearly tripled, read on for the details behind the badges.
This 1934-style Ford coupe hides an outlandish build sheet: three Chevy 350 V8s, 24 exhaust pipes, 16 coats of Imron paint, and Bridge of Weir leather inside. See what the photos confirm about this triple-engine show piece, and why builds this extreme almost never make it past the fabrication stage.
Eleanor tributes have become so common on the show circuit that most of them disappear into the crowd, wearing identical gray paint and identical black stripes. This 1967 G.T. 500 was built by an owner who clearly decided that was the whole problem, keeping the fastback bones everyone recognizes while throwing out the formula that makes the rest interchangeable. They call it the Pit Viper. Read on to find out what makes it different.
BMW’s New Six sedans built the template for every sporty, luxurious BMW that followed — and the pivotal version, the E3 Bavaria, only exists because one persistent American dealer refused to take no for an answer. Read on to find out how a scaled-back interior and a bigger engine created the car most historians credit with starting BMW’s entire American identity.
This red Charger is a 1968 model, the year Dodge completely reworked the car’s fastback shape into the coke-bottle, flying-buttress body that’s instantly recognizable today. The redesign worked — sales jumped roughly sixfold over the outgoing model, with about 96,100 built for the year. Order the R/T package and buyers got a standard 440 Magnum V8, with the fabled 426 Hemi available for those who wanted more.
This 1958 Oldsmobile 88 carries the rare J2 Tri-Power option, a vacuum-linked triple-carb setup Oldsmobile offered for only two model years. See what the photos really show about its color and condition, and why original J2 cars command a premium over the far more common single-carb 88s.
This driveway shot captures a 1966 Pontiac GTO, the year the GTO graduated from an options package on the Tempest to a model of its own. Buyers who ticked the box for the 389 cubic-inch Tri-Power engine got 360 horsepower, helping make 1966 the GTO’s best sales year yet. See if you can spot the details that give away the year before reading on.
For the first time in at least seven years, the Dodge Challenger outsold both the Ford Mustang and Chevrolet Camaro in a single month, arriving right as the 840-horsepower SRT Demon dominated headlines. This piece looks at the June 2017 sales numbers behind that milestone, the year-to-date totals that told a very different story, and what became of Challenger’s long production run afterward.
Ask a room full of Mustang owners how many 1966 GTs Ford actually built and you will get answers scattered across a very wide range, most of them wrong in one direction or the other. The GT Equipment Group had only existed for a single model year before 1966, and Ford’s factory records from the period are not as tidy as collectors would like. The real number surprises people who assume GTs were either far rarer or far more common than they were. Read on for the figure and why it keeps getting argued about.
This countdown of Ford’s greatest engines set off a wave of comments nominating everything from the bulletproof 300 straight-six to the underrated 351 Cleveland as glaring omissions. See which seven engines made the official cut, and judge for yourself whether the list holds up against a century of Ford engineering.
Kelley Blue Book pits the naturally aspirated Shelby GT350R, making roughly 100 horsepower per liter without a turbo or supercharger, against the supercharged Camaro ZL1 on both street and track. Viewers calling it one of the best Mustang-versus-Camaro comparisons ever filmed still can’t agree on a winner, with plenty admitting they’d happily own both. See which engineering philosophy — high-revving naturally aspirated power or supercharged torque — actually wins when both cars hit the same road.
An 11-alarm fire tore through a 530-foot warehouse at Country Classic Cars in Staunton, Illinois, destroying 143 vehicles including one-of-a-kind Hemi Road Runners, Chevelles, and Camaros. Investigators traced the blaze to one of five cars in the building’s center but never confirmed a cause. Here’s what happened, and what was lost, the night one of Route 66’s best-known classic car dealerships caught fire.