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1967 marked the final year of the Chevrolet El Camino’s second generation, and one of its most overlooked performance years. Buyers could order this car-truck hybrid with seven different powertrains, topping out with an SS396 big-block borrowed straight from the Chevelle. With just 34,830 built, clean surviving examples of this last-of-its-kind El Camino are increasingly hard to find.
Chevrolet’s El Camino spent most of its life looking like a work truck wearing a Chevy badge — until 1970, when a one-year corporate rule change let Chevy drop its 450-horsepower LS6 big-block under the hood. Only a few hundred buyers ever ordered that combination. Here’s why the rarest El Camino Chevrolet ever built deserves a second look.
This red 1970 El Camino SS wears its black stripe and vinyl top the way Chevrolet intended: parked among the muscle cars it was built to run with, not tucked away in a garage. Underneath the truck bed is a full Chevelle SS drivetrain, and across five model years Chevrolet pushed it from a 325-horsepower newcomer to the 450-horsepower LS6 454 before emissions rules caught up with it. Read on to see how the numbers changed year by year — and why the VIN tag matters more than the badge.
1972 was the year the El Camino finally proved itself, with production crossing 50,000 units for the first time ever. This particular survivor skips the big-block theatrics for a workhorse 350 and a three-speed — the combo real owners actually drove daily. Curious why a base-trim SS candidate can out-charm a 454 at a show? The answer’s in the numbers Chevy never advertised.
By 1980, Chevrolet wasn’t putting big-blocks in the El Camino anymore — so a build like this one wearing a 454 didn’t come off any factory floor. It came out of a garage where somebody decided the rulebook didn’t apply. Read on to find out what it actually takes to make a truck-based platform swallow a genuine big-block Pro Street build.
This customized 1960 Chevrolet El Camino rides on the rare full-size Brookwood platform used only during the model’s brief 1959-60 debut run, before Chevrolet discontinued it and later revived it on the smaller Chevelle platform in 1964. Even its own owner isn’t entirely sure what all has been done to it over the years. Read on to find out why this short-lived first generation nearly disappeared for good.
This 1985 Chevrolet El Camino crossed a strange threshold: old enough to be called a classic, but built for buyers who still saw it as a practical work vehicle rather than a collectible. Nicknamed the Cowboy Cadillac for straddling truck and car in equal measure, it carries original paint, original bench seating, and a full comfort-options sheet, plus a GM Goodwrench 350 crate engine standing in for whatever came from the factory. Read on for what made this coupe-utility, and its unlikely nickname, last eight years longer than its closest rival.
A 1970 Chevrolet El Camino SS and a 2004 Chevy SSR are separated by more than three decades and roughly 150 horsepower, and the distance between them says a great deal about what each era believed performance meant. One offered a 450-horsepower LS6 454 and a bed borrowed from a Chevelle; the other a 300-horsepower truck V8 and a folding metal roof. Read on for what each actually delivered and which is the smarter buy today.
This clean California 1966 Chevrolet El Camino wears a Chip Foose-inspired paint scheme and 17-inch Torque Thrust wheels over a 327 backed by an automatic. The 1966 model year mattered for the El Camino because Chevrolet restyled the Chevelle it was built on and, more importantly, finally made the 396 big block available. Production climbed past 35,000 units. Read on to find out what made this the year the formula finally worked.
Chevrolet had an El Camino prototype drawn up in 1952 and then let it sit untouched for seven years. What finally pushed it into production was watching Ford get rewarded for the same idea. The car that resulted wore Bel Air trim over a Biscayne interior, carried a corrugated steel bed floor, and in its hottest form ran a 14-second quarter with a tri-carb 348 under the hood. Two model years later it was gone. Read on to find out what killed it.
The 1960 Chevrolet El Camino is the model year most people skip past, and it is quietly the most interesting one. It was the last season Chevy built the El Camino on the full-size passenger car platform before dropping the nameplate entirely for three years, and sales had already fallen hard from the debut. A 350 small-block firing up under the hood of one is a giveaway too, because Chevrolet had not built that engine yet.
Before 1966, Chevrolet’s car-truck hybrid had never been offered with a true big-block V8 — buyers who wanted real performance had to look elsewhere. Adding the 396 changed that overnight, giving the El Camino a genuine muscle car engine option and helping push production past 35,000 units for the first time in the model’s history.
A 1972 Chevrolet El Camino and a 1970 Oldsmobile 442 convertible, both freshly restored, represent two completely different ideas of what a performance car should be. One is a pickup built on Chevelle bones with a 454 available; the other carried a 455 making 500 lb-ft of torque and paced the Indianapolis 500. Read on to find out why one of these restorations is far harder to get right.
This 1979 Chevrolet El Camino carries the last 350-cubic-inch V8 GM would ever offer in the model, riding on the sharper-edged Malibu-based body Chevrolet introduced for 1978. By this point the base engine had shrunk to a 200-cubic-inch V6 — a sign of where the truck-car hybrid, and the muscle car era around it, was heading. Read on to find out what made 1979 the end of an era for this unusual Chevrolet.