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A custom shop barely a year and a half old rolled four vehicles onto the SEMA 2016 floor, including a Plymouth ‘Cuda wearing a full carbon-fiber body built from parts customers could actually buy. That wasn’t the only rule getting rewritten that year — Dodge introduced the first all-wheel-drive American muscle car, and one shop found a way to add twin turbochargers on top of an already-supercharged Hellcat engine. Read on to find out how far builders were willing to push the muscle car formula.
Roland Cassidy assumed the pitch was too good to be true: a numbers-matching 426 Hemi Superbird with 10,000 original miles, one owner, and a complete paper trail back to a Maine dealership in 1971. It had been sitting untouched in a Massachusetts barn since 1990. Read on to find out what he had to throw in to close the deal.
Most Camaro buyers care about straight-line speed, but the ZL1 1LE was engineered for something different — carving corners on a road course, using suspension technology borrowed from actual race cars. Reviewer Brian Makse takes it through a full test with input from the Multimatic engineer behind its spool valve dampers. Watch to find out whether GM’s most track-focused Camaro trim lives up to the hardware underneath it.
Muscle car or pony car — Car Throttle tries to settle a debate that automotive enthusiasts have been having since the mid-1960s, tracing the difference from the original Pontiac GTO through today’s Hellcats and GT350s. The comment section turns the video into its own argument, complete with a tongue-in-cheek Jeremy Clarkson litmus test and a full lineage of what actually counts as modern muscle. Watch to see where the line really falls — and why almost nobody agrees on it.
1970 finally gave the Ford Ranchero its own identity — Ranchero or Ranchero GT badges on the glovebox instead of Fairlane or Torino script, plus a pointed grille, hideaway headlights, and coke-bottle styling that left the old body looking dated overnight. Four distinct trims rolled out that year, from the woodgrain Squire to a GT that could be ordered with a 370-horsepower 429 Cobra Jet. Here’s how Ford split its unibody truck-car into four very different personalities for one model year.
This 1960 Buick Invicta convertible still carries its original 401 cubic-inch Nailhead V8, a genuine 325-horsepower engine Buick built for buyers who wanted real performance without admitting they wanted a hot rod. The nickname that followed the Invicta around, “the banker’s hot rod,” captures exactly the contradiction between its respectable badge and what was actually happening under the hood. Read on to find out what made this quietly powerful Buick tick.
Charley Lillard’s 1970 Chevrolet Camaro carries just 1,130 actual miles — parked in a heated garage nearly forty years ago after a minor ding and untouched ever since, right down to the original air still sealed in its tires. He debuted it at the first-ever Muscle Car and Corvette Nationals in Rosemont, Illinois, where it stood out even among a field of other rare survivors. Finds this undisturbed almost never happen.
Buried under winter road grime for years, this 1970 Plymouth Superbird turned out to be one of the most original wing cars still in existence — 40,000 miles, its factory 440, four-speed, and Dana 60 rear all intact. Instead of a full restoration, the owner chose careful preservation, right down to re-leading the body seams the way Plymouth did in 1970. What’s under all that grime is rarer than most collectors ever get to find. Watch the discovery and early repair work up close.
This 1962 Buick Invicta wagon carries the nickname “Airwagon,” earned when Air Ride Technologies took on the rare nine-passenger body style as a build project. Under the hood sits a numbers-matching 401 Nailhead V8, swapped from its original two-speed Turbine Drive automatic to a smoother four-speed. Gateway Classic Cars photographed the full car for this gallery, from the engine bay to the polished chrome trim, one of the least common body styles Buick built during the Invicta’s run.
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.
All Speed Customs skipped the Hemi entirely on this 1971 Plymouth Barracuda, dropping a V-10 and a paddle-shift transmission into a body reworked with custom modifications, silver paint, and red accents. The build, nicknamed Medusa, stopped traffic at the 2017 Detroit Autorama with a back-seat ‘wall of sound’ audio system and a fully custom interior. One viewer said it belonged in the Louvre. See why this Cuda broke every rule a numbers-matching restoration would follow.
An estate sale, a numbers-matching V8 sitting on a stand in a garage, and a certified appraiser willing to put a hard number on all of it — that’s the setup behind this 1968 Buick GS 400 out of Port Huron, Michigan. AutoAppraise’s Jason Phillips values the car at $35,000 after tallying over $20,000 in documented drivetrain work alone, but it’s the low, bellowing idle that keeps pulling viewers back years later. Is a scarce, correctly-matched GS400 actually the smartest buy in 1968 muscle?
A modestly modified 2003 SVT Cobra lines up against a brand-new, completely stock 2016 Corvette Z06 in this DirtySS street pull, and the result has split comment sections for years. Longtime Mustang owners argue the horsepower math doesn’t add up for a bolt-on Terminator to hang with a factory-supercharged Z06, which only fuels the debate over what’s really under that hood. The footage keeps circulating precisely because nobody can fully agree on the answer.
The vintage convertible daydream usually dies at the price tag, but it does not have to. Alfa Romeo Spiders, Volkswagen Beetle cabriolets, and even 1970s and 1980s Mercedes-Benz SLs still trade for under $10,000 in the right condition, while the muscle-era American droptops most fans grew up wanting left that bracket long ago. The catch is what a cheap convertible can hide under fresh carpet and a decent-looking top. Read on for which models are still affordable, why they stayed that way, and what to check before buying one.
The 1941 Chevrolet Master Deluxe and Special Deluxe carried Harley Earl’s Royal Clipper design, hidden running boards, recessed headlights, and a lower, wider stance meant to echo Buick at a Chevrolet price. Both trims shared a 216.5-cubic-inch six making 90 horsepower, differing mainly in interior trim and brightwork. Chevrolet built over 400,000 Master Deluxe examples that year, unknowingly closing out its last full production year before World War II production took over.