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Long before muscle cars ruled the streets, an electric car with no engine roar at all set the record for fastest vehicle on earth. Camille Jenatzy’s La Jamais Contente broke 100 km/h in 1899 using nothing but two electric motors and a featherweight aluminum shell. This trivia roundup also covers the Chevy Vega’s ill-fated Car of the Year win and the shifting balance of global car manufacturing power.
Take a genuine 1968 Dodge Coronet, strip off the rear wheels, and bolt on a pair of snowmobile tracks, and you get a machine that shouldn’t work but somehow does. This half-track conversion trades quarter-mile bragging rights for the ability to plow through drifts most trucks wouldn’t attempt, built by a hobbyist working almost entirely from scratch. Half-track conversions have a strange, scattered history in American car culture — finding one wearing a genuine muscle car body is rarer still. Read on to find out what makes this build so unusual.
1959 was the year Pontiac reinvented itself, debuting the Wide-Track stance, the split grille, and a genuinely potent 389 V8 all in the same model year, and taking home Motor Trend’s Car of the Year for it. This black Bonneville wears that transformation beautifully, every line of the redesign sharpened by the deep paint. Read on to find out why Pontiac decided to stop playing it safe.
This 1966 Pontiac GTO convertible carries PHS documentation tracing it back to Moody Pontiac in Fort Lauderdale, Florida, and it left the factory with the 389 four-barrel, power steering, power brakes and factory air conditioning. 1966 was the year the GTO stopped being an option package and became a model in its own right, and buyers responded by making it the best-selling muscle car in America. The convertible was always the scarcer half of that story. Read on for what separates a documented survivor from the clones.
This 1973 Pontiac Ventura started life as a badge-engineered Chevy Nova twin, sold on trim and sound insulation rather than performance. Factory power topped out at a mild 150-horsepower 350 V8, a far cry from Pontiac’s GTO-era muscle. This particular example has been built well beyond stock, with custom exhaust, upgraded V8 work, and a sharp two-tone paint job that turns an overlooked compact into a genuine sleeper. It’s proof that an anonymous badge-engineered car can still earn a second look.
Not every muscle car is equally easy to bring back to life, and the difference usually comes down to how deep the aftermarket parts catalog runs. From the Mustang and Camaro to the Chevelle and beyond, some nameplates make restoration dramatically simpler than others. Read on to find out which cars make the cut and why.
Jeff Fleming’s 1968 Dodge Charger R/T wears a Medium Gold paint job over a genuine 426 Hemi, restored to a standard that reads as showroom-new nearly sixty years later. Mopar fans in the comments zeroed in on a detail only true Charger obsessives notice: 1968 was the only year Dodge used round side marker and taillights on this body style. One viewer admitted the restoration was so clean it made them nervous just watching. See what sets this Charger apart.
Steam power was a genuine rival to internal combustion in the earliest days of the automobile, and Leon Serpollet’s flash boiler was central to that fight. His design generated usable steam almost instantly instead of requiring a long warm-up, and in 1902 it helped him set a 75 mph land speed record. His death in 1907 left flash-boiler technology as one of the automobile’s more fascinating dead ends.
Mecum’s 2017 Kissimmee auction moved nearly 2,000 cars over ten days for more than $86 million, but the muscle car story wasn’t about factory options, it was about competition history. Vintage drag racers from two significant private collections stole attention from the seven-figure Hemis that had defined the previous year’s sale. The results showed real racing pedigree can outweigh raw rarity at auction.
A concours-quality restoration isn’t measured in weekends — it’s measured in years, with top shops logging 4,000-plus labor hours per car at $135-plus per hour. The difference between a nice classic and a Pebble Beach contender comes down to details most people would never notice: bolt heads, stitching patterns, and paint sheens matched to factory records decades old.
Jay Lenos Burbank garage holds an estimated 180 cars and 160 motorcycles, but a handful of American muscle cars keep coming up whenever he talks about the ones he loves most. A 1970 Dodge Challenger R/T and a 1969 Camaro Z28 sit alongside oddballs like the front-wheel-drive 1966 Oldsmobile Toronado. Here is what his favorites say about what makes a muscle car worth keeping.
This Redline review digs into the 2017 Cadillac CTS-V, a 640-horsepower sedan built around a supercharged LT4 V8 shared with the Corvette Z06 — and a car that a former Cadillac salesperson in the comments calls a genuine monster to drive. It’s American muscle wearing a suit, aimed squarely at Germany’s best. Watch the full review to see why so few people talk about it.
This 1962 Chrysler New Yorker wears a 440 V8 that Chrysler hadn’t even invented yet when the car was built. Under an orange-and-purple flake paintjob sits air suspension, a locking differential, and side pipes loud enough to turn heads before the paint does. Read on to find out what the New Yorker actually left the factory with, and why a builder would swap it for an engine four years its junior.
The fourth-generation Pontiac GTO was not designed in Detroit. It was built in Australia, imported nearly complete, and given a GTO badge because a General Motors board member read a magazine article and then drove one on a business trip. It had Corvette power, a legitimate 13.8-second quarter, and an exhaust note reverse-engineered from archived recordings. American buyers still walked past it. Read on for why, and why that makes it a bargain now.
Aston Martin’s DBS doesn’t look like a typical Aston — its squared grille and fastback tail borrowed more from American muscle car design than English tradition. That unusual shape hid a V8 upgrade in 1969 that briefly made it the fastest four-seat production car in the world, and a starring role as James Bond’s car the same year. Here’s how a British grand tourer ended up channeling Detroit.