Retro Review: 1987 GM Muscle Cars: SS,

MotorWeek pulled its own vault tape from 1987 to revisit a lineup of GM performance cars built during one of the toughest stretches in muscle car history. The SS badges were back, the numbers were tested the same way they always are, and three decades later the verdict still holds up. See what MotorWeek’s original road test crew actually thought at the time.

There’s a decade car people love to skip over when the muscle car story gets told — the years when insurance rates, emissions rules, and a nervous Detroit nearly buried the whole idea of a factory hot rod. MotorWeek was there for it, camera rolling, and this retro review pulls their own vault footage back out to show what GM was building in 1987 to prove the performance era wasn’t actually dead. The badges say SS, the test numbers are period-correct, and the verdict from three decades ago still holds up in ways that might surprise you. Before you assume you know how an ’80s muscle car test ages, watch what MotorWeek’s own tape says about it.

GM’s Answer to a Decade That Wanted Muscle Cars Dead

In the early-to-mid 1980s, the American performance car had been reduced to badges and stripes on top of anemic emissions-choked V8s, and GM spent the back half of the decade clawing its way back. By 1987, that fight had real hardware behind it — turbocharged and fuel-injected engines, a Camaro IROC-Z with genuinely credible handling, and an SS-badged lineup that borrowed as much from GM‘s NASCAR programs as it did from marketing departments. MotorWeek’s original test drivers were skeptical by trade, which is exactly why their numbers from that era carry weight today.

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What the Stopwatch Actually Said in 1987

Retro reviews like this one work because MotorWeek didn’t grade on a curve for nostalgia — they ran the same acceleration, braking, and handling tests they ran on every other car that year, and the printed numbers from 1987 are what they are. For cars built during an era when horsepower was still recovering from its late-70s low point, the results on these GM performers held their own against imports costing considerably more. That combination of measured performance and factory pricing is a big part of why these specific years get re-litigated by MotorWeek’s own staff decades later.

Why the Late-’80s GM Cars Still Split Opinion

Ask ten muscle car people what they think of the 1987 GM lineup and you’ll get ten different answers — some call it the last gasp of a dying formula, others call it the moment GM figured out how to build a fast car people could actually afford to insure. Part of what makes this MotorWeek footage valuable is that it was recorded in real time, with none of the rosy hindsight that colors how these cars get remembered now. The show’s own on-camera reactions from 1987 are more honest, and often more critical, than most retrospectives written today.

A Vault Tape Worth Revisiting

What makes this particular Retro Review worth a watch isn’t just seeing the cars — it’s hearing MotorWeek’s original, unfiltered take on a lineup that history has since been kinder to than the era itself was. These late-’80s GM SS models are increasingly collectible now, and archival test footage like this is one of the few honest records of what buyers were actually told at the time, before the collector market rewrote the narrative.

Where These Cars Sit in the Collector Market Today

Clean, unmolested examples of GM‘s 1987 performance cars have quietly climbed in value over the last several years, driven by a generation of buyers who grew up seeing these exact models in period road tests like this one. They’re still more attainable than their 1960s ancestors, which is exactly why footage like MotorWeek’s original review matters — it’s a documented, dated snapshot of what these cars cost and how they performed before nostalgia pricing took hold.

Why Archival Test Footage Beats a Modern Retrospective

Modern car reviewers often build entire retrospectives around cars they never personally tested when they were new, relying on old magazine clippings and secondhand anecdotes to reconstruct what a period road test might have found. MotorWeek doesn’t have that problem with a Retro Review — the original test was conducted, filmed, and aired by the same institution revisiting it decades later, with the same testing philosophy applied both times. That continuity is rare in automotive media, and it’s exactly why a MotorWeek Retro Review carries more weight than a modern channel’s guess at how an ’87 GM muscle car might have performed against its period rivals.

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