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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.
A YouTuber talked his way into a decaying barn that had swallowed six real muscle cars since the mid-1990s, then walked out having bought one of the rarest Chevelle LS6s left on earth. But it’s the collection’s priciest car — a ‘matching-numbers’ Chevelle listed for $175,000 — that has viewers combing through every frame looking for what its paperwork isn’t saying.
A black cherry 1970 Chevelle LS6 carries a VIN and trim-tag date stamp that place it at the very end of that year’s production run, fueling a claim that it may be the last LS6 ever built. With 450 horsepower and 500 lb-ft from its 454 big block, it briefly out-muscled the Corvette itself. Only 4,475 were ever made.
Chevrolet sold the 1970 Super Sport as a checkbox on a Malibu order form, not as its own model – which is why a genuine SS and a well-built tribute carry the same VIN format. A ,995 big-block car in Iowa puts the problem in sharp relief. Here is the documentation that separates a ,000 driver from a ,000 collectible.
The 1970 Chevrolet Chevelle SS 454 came with two very different big-blocks — the 360-horsepower LS5 and the race-bred, 450-horsepower LS6 — and disputed production numbers that still fuel debate at auction. Viewer comments add their own family history, from a Fathom Green LS6 to a rumored Corvette-swapped ’67. Few muscle cars generate this many personal stories fifty years later.