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This 1966 Dodge Coronet claims to be one of just seventeen 426 Hemi cars ever built — a number worth digging into before you take it at face value. Mopar’s own Hemi Coronet production records are murkier than you’d expect. Here’s what the real numbers say, and why it barely matters once you hear it run.
One advertising jingle did more to shape how Americans imagined the open road than almost any single car ever built. It started in 1948 as a song written for a television variety program, found its permanent voice in Dinah Shore, and ran as a Sunday night ritual through 1963. The story of how six words got planted that deeply in the American psyche is stranger, and considerably more musical, than most car fans realize.
Chevrolet’s own restoration story covers two cars that could not be more different in temperament: a family sedan that quietly became a status symbol, and a pony car built specifically to answer a rival. One rewards six-cylinder patience, the other rewards a six-figure hunt. Here’s what actually separates a smart Bel Air or Camaro buy from an expensive mistake.
Ford stopped building its flathead V8 in 1953, and it still hasn’t gotten the memo that it’s supposed to be forgotten. Decades later, flathead-powered cars were still setting land-speed records at 300 mph, built by hot rodders working the same engine that once powered ordinary Ford sedans. Read on to find out how a design this old became the engine that built the entire hot rod movement.
In June 2017 the Dodge Challenger did something it had not managed in at least seven years: it outsold both the Ford Mustang and the Chevrolet Camaro in a single month, 6,605 units to 6,186 and 4,691. The platform underneath it dated to 2008, and both rivals were far newer. Here is how the segment’s supposed underdog pulled off the upset, and why the year-to-date numbers tell a more complicated story.
Ford’s Y-block V8 got its nickname from its own silhouette, but it carried a hidden oiling flaw that could quietly destroy an engine from the inside, one that Ford’s own racing program solved years before the factory did. Despite the flaw, and a hard displacement ceiling nobody could engineer around, the Y-block gave Ford a real advantage over Chevrolet for three straight years. Read on to find out how the fix worked and where the engine’s limits finally showed up.
Before it became the most famous crime-fighting car on television, the 1955 Lincoln Futura was a $250,000 Ghia-built concept car with a double plastic canopy and a 300-horsepower V8. A decade later, George Barris pulled it out of storage and turned it into the original Batmobile. Here’s the real story behind the car everyone’s been trying to guess.
Two months before any other Ford product carried it, the FE V8 made its debut in the unlikeliest of cars: the all-new 1958 Edsel. From there it split into truck duty, police-package cruisers, and factory tri-power setups shipped loose in the trunk, before a redesigned block gave rise to the short-lived but influential 406. Read on to find out how a workhorse engine family quietly built the foundation for Ford’s most feared big-blocks.
A concours-quality restoration isn’t measured in weekends — it’s measured in years, with top shops logging 4,000-plus labor hours per car at $135-plus per hour. The difference between a nice classic and a Pebble Beach contender comes down to details most people would never notice: bolt heads, stitching patterns, and paint sheens matched to factory records decades old.
A professional appraiser puts this numbers-matching, V-code 1970 ‘Cuda through its paces on a curvy Maryland back road after a full rotisserie, frame-off restoration, and the 440 6-Barrel big block doesn’t disappoint. One detail even catches the inspector’s trained eye. See what separates a genuinely correct E-body restoration from an ordinary one, straight from someone whose job is finding the difference.
Long before the Hemi, Dodge started as a bicycle-parts patent and a Detroit machine shop making stove parts. Horace and John Dodge built their fortune as Henry Ford’s exclusive parts supplier, sometimes paid in stock instead of cash, before striking out to build cars under their own name in 1914. Their story ends almost as fast as it began.
The 2008 Dodge Challenger SRT8 launched with a waiting list before most buyers ever sat in one, thanks to a shortened LC platform, a numbered dash plaque, and a 425-horsepower Hemi under the hood. Riding on the same bones as the Chrysler 300 and Dodge Charger, it kept the long-hood look that made the original Challenger famous. Only 6,400 were built for the U.S. market, and nearly every one sold above sticker.
Edelbrock built its reputation on performance parts cast entirely in the USA, and this video takes cameras inside the two foundries where that happens — molding, pouring, machining, and final inspection, all in one place. Former employees who’ve worked the exact stations shown, from furnace operator to CMM inspector, weigh in in the comments with details the video itself doesn’t spell out. It’s a rare look at where a trusted name in muscle car parts actually comes from.
For 23 months straight, the Ford Mustang outsold the Chevrolet Camaro every single month — until one September, when Chevrolet edged ahead by just 148 units, 6,577 to 6,429. The swing came right as Ford halted Mustang production over a sales slide, while new 2017 Camaro ZL1s were posting 554 rear-wheel horsepower on customer dynos. Read on to see how one of America’s oldest rivalries flipped in a single month.
Long before Ford or Chevrolet dominated American roads, a small Michigan company was already outproducing nearly every rival combined with a simple, curved-dash runabout that most people today have never heard of. Oldsmobile’s early embrace of assembly-line manufacturing and aggressive pricing let it claim a commanding share of the entire U.S. auto market by 1903. Here is how one inexpensive little car built the template every automaker since has followed.