Secret Ist ever 1967 Camaro built May 1966 Num. N100001

Long before the 1967 Chevrolet Camaro ever reached a showroom floor, one unit rolled off the line in May 1966 wearing a serial number that reads more like a birth certificate than a VIN: N100001. It’s the literal first Camaro ever built — and its story is one most enthusiasts have never heard. Watch to find out what survives of it today.

Somewhere in a General Motors build sheet from the spring of 1966 is a serial number that does not belong to a production car. It belongs to something closer to a birth certificate: N100001, the very first 1967 Chevrolet Camaro ever assembled, built months before the model technically existed on paper. Most first-model-year cars are treated as curiosities. This one is treated like a relic, because it represents the exact moment an entire model line came into being. What survives of it today, and where it has been hiding, is the kind of story that only surfaces once in a great while.

Building a Car Before the Model Year Existed

Automakers routinely built pilot and pre-production units before a model’s public launch, using them for engineering validation, crash testing, press previews, and dealer training well ahead of showroom day. That practice is exactly why a car like this can carry a build date months earlier than its official model year suggests, and why pre-production cars from any manufacturer are treated so differently from the regular-production units that followed them off the same line. The Camaro itself launched for 1967 specifically as Chevrolet’s answer to the Ford Mustang, making its earliest surviving example a piece of a genuine corporate rivalry as much as an engineering milestone, born directly out of Chevrolet needing an answer in the pony car segment.

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What N100001 Actually Represents

What makes N100001 significant is not an option package or a rare engine, it is pure sequence. Being literally the first unit off the line gives it a historical weight that has nothing to do with trim level or drivetrain, which sets it apart from the way collector value usually works. Numbers-matching desirability is normally tied to rare factory options, a big block engine, a specific paint code, a documented performance package. This car’s value is tied purely to being first, a distinction no amount of aftermarket investment could ever recreate on another car.

Why First-Year Camaros Already Command a Premium

First-generation Camaros already command real money in today’s market, and 1967 examples sit at the top of that hierarchy simply for being the debut year, with SS, RS, and big-block cars fetching the strongest prices at auction. A verified first-built example, if it survives in anything close to original condition, would sit above even those benchmarks in almost any serious collector’s estimation, occupying a category more comparable to a historical artifact than a typical restoration project.

A Story Worth Passing Along Carefully

Stories like this travel through the enthusiast community precisely because they are rare enough to need retelling, and this one comes by way of another creator’s original research and footage, credited here as Drew Money, a reminder that preserving vehicle provenance is as much a community effort as an individual one. Cars like N100001 matter less for what they can do on the road and more for what they prove about where an entire era of American performance actually started, one specific chassis at a time.

How Pre-Production Cars Usually Resurface

Pre-production cars from any manufacturer tend to resurface the same way this one apparently did: quietly, often through a private collection rather than a public auction, and usually with incomplete paperwork trailing behind them since factory pilot cars were never meant to carry a normal consumer title in the first place. GM historians and Camaro registries spend considerable effort trying to track exactly this kind of unit down, cross-referencing plant records against surviving VIN tags, precisely because so few pre-production examples of any model survive being scrapped, crash-tested, or simply lost once their engineering purpose had been served.

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