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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.
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.
Chevrolet needed a new face for its NASCAR Cup Series program after the SS sedan went out of production, so it turned to the Camaro ZL1 — a nameplate every enthusiast recognizes, attached to a race car that shares nothing with the road version. Underneath sits the same tube-frame chassis and pushrod V8 the SS ran. The gamble paid off in the very first race. Read on to find out how the swap actually worked, and why the problem came back around.
One careful owner put just 17,000 miles on this 1966 Chevrolet Nova SS before the current owner tracked it down and restored it — and it’s a genuine, factory-built SS, not a badge job. Low-mile survivors like this one are rare precisely because most Novas of this era got driven hard and used up. Read on to find out what makes an original like this one different from anything else on the market.
For 1970 only, Chevrolet let a mid-size Chevelle carry a higher factory horsepower rating than any Corvette on the order sheet. The LS6 454 was rated at 450 horsepower, and just 4,475 SS454 LS6 Chevelles were built across every body style. Historians estimate as few as 20 to 25 were convertibles. Read on to find out what made this Cortez Silver drop-top one of the rarest Chevelles ever built.
The fifth-generation Camaro returned for 2010 with five trims, a 426-horsepower SS, and a 550-horsepower LS7 concept car that eventually became a 69-unit COPO production run. It paced the Indy 500 three years running and became the dominant Chevrolet on NASCAR grids by 2013. Read on for the full breakdown of engines, trims, and racing pedigree behind the Camaro’s comeback.
The 409 might be the only engine in American history sold as much by a pop song as by a marketing department. Chevrolet moved 142 of them in 1961 and more than fifteen thousand the following year, and a Beach Boys B-side released that same summer had a great deal to do with the difference. This black 1962 Impala SS wears the nickname Black Diamond and a 409 under the hood. Read on to find out which version of that engine actually mattered.
Chevrolet built 7,209 Nova SS 396s for 1969, and most buyers skipped the milder engine option for the one built to actually hurt people at the drag strip. Five hundred pounds lighter than a Chevelle running the same 396, this compact turned into one of the quickest cars Chevrolet sold that year. Read on to find out why Chevrolet let its cheapest muscle car become one of its fastest.
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.
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.
Every 1970 Chevelle SS 396 badge tells a small lie, and the parenthetical in this convertible’s own description gives it away. The 396 that year was really a 402, bored out for reasons that had nothing to do with power, and Chevrolet kept the old emblem anyway. This 350-horsepower drop-top adds bucket seats, tilt wheel, air conditioning, and a power top to the story. Read on to find out why the badge and the engine stopped matching.
That ‘396’ badge on this 1972 Camaro SS is telling a small lie – Chevrolet quietly bored the engine out to 402 cubic inches back in 1970 and just never bothered updating the fender emblem. Add in a 174-day UAW strike that crushed Camaro production that same year, and this clean Graphite Gray Pro Touring build is sitting on a genuinely rare factory foundation. Only 970 Camaros left the line wearing this exact big-block SS package. Read on to find out why 1972 was the end of the road for the big-block Camaro.
The 1970 Chevelle LS6 made a factory-claimed 450 horsepower, with some reports suggesting the real number was closer to 500. By 1972, GM’s own base wagon was outselling every SS performance package in the lineup. Insurance rules, lower-octane fuel, and a new net-horsepower rating system all played a part. Read on to find out exactly how much power the Chevelle lost in just two model years, and why.
One of our readers walked into a Chevrolet showroom in 1967 while still in high school, paid cash, and drove home in a brand-new Camaro that never left his ownership. Fifty years later the car is still immaculate, wearing dual white racing stripes and a story most muscle car fans only dream about. Read on to find out what it actually takes to keep a first car for half a century.
A salvage yard in Vancouver, Washington holds rows of first-generation 1967-1969 Camaros, stacked and slowly being parted out rather than restored. Some commenters call it Camaro heaven; others insist it’s the opposite. Between debates over the best of the three body styles and stories of cars sold too cheap decades ago, this yard says a lot about what gets saved in the classic car world, and what doesn’t. Watch to see what’s actually still sitting there.