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The 1963 Impala SS looks like a full-size cruiser and, ordered correctly, was one of the fastest cars Chevrolet sold that year. The car in this Gateway Classic Cars gallery carries the rare factory dash-mounted tachometer, an option most buyers skipped and the one that tells you what the original owner intended. Read on for the engine that a pop song made famous and the aluminum trim that defines the model year.
The third-generation Impala arrived in 1961 looking like nothing Chevrolet had built before, and it produced two body styles that collectors now hunt specifically because almost nobody wanted them when they were new. It also produced a 409 that got its own hit song, a dashboard where the temperature gauge was replaced by a warning light, and a 1964 engine option good for 425 horsepower. Read on for what separates the good years from the great ones.
In 1965, Chevrolet sold more than one million Impalas in a single year — an all-time industry record that has never been broken. Over the next five years the car would get outshined by its own spinoff, borrow styling cues from the Corvette, and quietly absorb a wave of new federal safety mandates. Read on to find out how a record-setting best-seller ended up playing second fiddle to the model it created.
This 1970 Chevrolet Impala, powered by a 350 small-block paired with a TH350 automatic, hadn’t run since 1993, 23 years of silence before this restart attempt. Using nothing more than a dwell meter, timing light, and decades of hands-on know-how, host Jonathan walks through exactly what it takes to wake up an engine everyone assumed was finished. Watch to hear how it sounds once it finally catches.
Chevrolet only built the dual-quad 409 for a handful of years before the Mark IV big-block replaced it in 1965, and fewer than 9,000 Impalas got the engine in its final season. Here’s what made the 425-horsepower dual-quad version special, why survivors are so rare, and what to check before buying one.
The Impala SS started as a single trim-level box to check on an order form. Within a few years it had three separate VIN prefixes, its own RPO code history, and a 425-horsepower engine option most buyers never even knew to ask for. Read on to find out why Chevrolet killed it after 1969 — and brought it back more than once since.
Barn Find Hunter’s Tom Cotter pulls off an Arizona highway for a cinder-block motorcycle shop and finds a pair of Mopars for sale in the desert — then discovers a set of original big-block Camaros parked nearby. Both Camaros sold quickly after the episode aired, and the comments add their own barn-find stories, from a numbers-matching Impala to a first-gen El Camino fans can’t stop talking about. Hagerty’s series keeps proving how much original muscle is still hiding in plain sight. Watch to see what else Tom finds.
The Beach Boys wrote a hit song about it, but Chevrolet’s 409 was only the public face of a much bigger story. Behind the scenes, a secret 427-cubic-inch “mystery motor” was quietly setting records at Daytona in 1963 while Chevrolet stayed silent about what powered it. Read on to find out how a handful of aluminum-bodied drag cars evolved into the 427 that would eventually power Corvettes, Camaros, and Chevelles for years to come.
In 1959, Chevrolet finally gave the Impala its own model line instead of treating it as a Bel Air option package, and backed it up with a lowered, widened body sharing sheet metal with Buick and Oldsmobile, horizontal tailfins, and an engine range topping out at 315 horsepower. A year later, Chevrolet toned almost all of it down. Read on to find out what changed, and why some Impalas from this era were hand-built in Australia.
Chevrolet sold more than 1.2 million cars in 1958, and the Bel Air line, now sitting one rung below the brand-new Impala, accounted for nearly half of them. Underneath its redesigned, baby Cadillac styling sat a new frame and an engine lineup that stretched from a mild six-cylinder up to a freshly introduced big-block V8.
POWERNATION rescues a rusted, neglected 1961 Impala left to rot in a field, rebuilding the corroded frame, floor pans, and rear tubs before dropping in a period-correct 409 V8 and four-speed manual. The finished build, nicknamed Red Sled, has drawn more than six million views and won over commenters who admitted the 61 Impala was not even their favorite year — until they saw this one. Watch the full transformation from rust to show car.
The Chevrolet Impala carries a name borrowed from an African antelope and a backstory that started as a Corvette-inspired concept car nobody expected to reach production. From a 1956 Motorama prototype to becoming America’s best-selling car by 1965, the Impala’s rise wasn’t guaranteed at any step along the way. Read on to see how a styling sketch turned into one of the longest-running nameplates in Chevrolet history.
Robert Wiater spent more than twelve years building his 1970 Chevrolet Impala in a garage in Rio Rancho, New Mexico, and the racing exhaust gives it away before you ever see the car. 1970 was the first year without an Impala SS, even as the big-block 454 replaced the outgoing 427 under the hood. Wiater’s build carries no SS badge, just over a decade of personal labor. Read on for the story behind one retired truck driver’s take on a full-size muscle car most people overlook.
Chevrolet’s full-size Super Sport went from a genuine performance flagship in 1966 to a nearly unmarked sleeper by 1969, as buyers defected to the Chevelle and Nova and the SS427 option shrank to just a few thousand units a year. Front disc brakes finally arrived in the model’s final season. Read on to find out how to tell a genuine SS427 from a well-built tribute.
A single classic-car marketplace crunched a year of search traffic and produced a map that reads like a territorial dispute. Ford and Chevrolet each claimed exactly twenty states, one nameplate racked up nearly four million searches on its own, and one New England state broke ranks entirely. The results say as much about how Americans shop for old cars as they do about brand loyalty. Read on to see where the lines fell.