Posts Tagged: General Motors
Fifty years ago General Motors answered the Ford Mustang not once but twice, and a museum exhibit is now putting the Camaro and Firebird side by side with the movie cars that turned them into pop culture icons. One shape-shifted into an alien robot on screen; the other spent a decade running from the law with a trucker at the wheel. Here’s why GM built two separate pony cars instead of one.
By the mid-1960s, Oldsmobile had a branding problem hiding in plain sight: the word “old” sitting right in its own name. The company’s answer wasn’t a rename, it was a full reinvention built around the 4-4-2 option package, a livelier Cutlass lineup, and advertising aimed at buyers who had never considered an Oldsmobile before. Read on to find out how a brand built for retirees ended up building some of the era’s most collected muscle cars.
A 1967 television commercial for the Pontiac GTO sold horsepower the way modern car ads almost never do – through swagger, identity, and a voice actor’s delivery that viewers are still praising decades later. One commenter even traces BMW’s Ultimate Driving Machine slogan back to what Pontiac was already doing here first. Watch to hear the pitch that built a legend.
Nancy and Bob Dunbar’s original-owner 1969 Pontiac GTO Judge carries more than just decades of careful care — its bright Carousel Red paint exists because of a General Motors turf war between Pontiac and Chevrolet that project manager John DeLorean simply refused to lose. Only the first roughly 2,000 Judges built that year wore this exact shade before Pontiac expanded the color palette. Read on to find out how a color dispute shaped one of Pontiac’s most recognizable muscle cars.
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.
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.
Chevrolet built the 1987 Monte Carlo SS Aerocoupe strictly to satisfy NASCAR’s homologation rules — but production exploded from 200 cars in 1986 to over 6,000 the following year once buyers caught on. That steeply raked backlight wasn’t just a superspeedway trick; it turned into one of the most collectible G-bodies Chevrolet ever built.
A Texas tuning shop put a bone-stock 2017 Camaro ZL1 and its brand-new 10-speed automatic through a real 0-180 mph pull, and the data logger caught it still upshifting at the top end. Viewers argued over everything from the fuel gauge to a short-shifted launch. Hennessey teased something far more extreme was coming next. Watch the full run to see it.
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.
More than a million buyers drove home in a Chevrolet Impala during 1965 alone – a single-model-year record that’s never been broken. Behind that number sat an engine lineup ranging from a thrifty six-cylinder all the way up to a 425-horsepower 396 Turbo-Jet V8. The photos above, courtesy of Gateway Classic Cars, capture why this generation still turns heads at cruise nights today. Sales records aside, this was a genuinely well-designed car.
A nineteenth-century French physicist’s glass jar of lead and acid still powers every muscle car on the road today. Gaston Plante’s 1859 lead-acid battery set the template that Delco and Detroit’s big-block engines would come to depend on for reliable starts. Here is how a decades-old invention quietly shaped the cars in this trivia list.
The 2014 Corvette Stingray spent seven years and three delayed launch dates becoming GM’s answer to a demographic problem nobody wanted to say out loud. Carbon fiber panels, a 455-horsepower LT1 V8, and a completely redesigned cabin were only part of the plan — the rest played out in a video game and at Indianapolis. Read on to find out how a seventh-generation Corvette tried to out-argue its own reputation.
Long before Detroit’s muscle car wars, two Indiana blacksmiths built a company that would eventually produce one of the era’s most overlooked performance machines. The Studebaker brothers started with horseshoes, survived a Civil War wagon contract, and only reluctantly entered the automobile business decades later. Their company’s final act included a supercharged V8 capable of matching contemporaries from Detroit’s Big Three. It simply ran out of time to prove it.
The 1966 Buick Skylark Gran Sport carried a 401-cubic-inch nailhead V8 that Buick was obliged to advertise as a 400, because GM had capped intermediate engine displacement at that figure. It made 325 horsepower and a genuinely enormous 445 lb-ft of torque, which is how the engine got its Wildcat 445 name. It also cost meaningfully more than a GTO. Read on for why Buick’s muscle car was the fastest one nobody bought.