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The 1967 Shelby GT500 traded the GT350’s twitchy small-block for a detuned police-spec 428 big-block, wrapped in the most aggressive bodywork a Mustang had worn to date. Ford’s official horsepower number fooled almost nobody who actually drove one, and the fastback body that carried it was no accident either. Read on to find out why the underrating happened in the first place.
Ford doesn’t touch the Mustang lightly, and a mid-cycle refresh to the current generation brought more than just a new grille. A revamped transmission, a digital dashboard, and suspension technology borrowed from the Shelby GT350 all quietly arrived under the new sheet metal. Read on to find out which changes actually mattered to serious Mustang buyers.
No year, no trim, just an orange Barracuda lighting up its rear tires in a parking lot — and that’s enough to send any Mopar fan down a rabbit hole. Plymouth built the Barracuda for just eleven years, peaking with a legendary 1970 lineup that included a 340 six-pack special built purely to go racing. Here’s what made that short run so wild, and why it ended almost as fast as it began.
For the Camaro’s 50th anniversary, Chevrolet didn’t settle for a badge and a paint stripe. The sixth-generation car arrived smaller, sharper-handling, and backed by a lineup running from a 275-horsepower turbo-four up to a 455-horsepower SS V8, with a new ZL1 added specifically for the occasion. Here’s what made the anniversary edition — and the platform underneath it — genuinely worth the celebration.
Van Hurst’s father once owned this 1969 Chevelle COPO — before it left the family, disappeared for years, and turned up again through nothing more than an internet search. Built through Chevrolet’s Central Office Production Order loophole, the car was deliberately disguised as a base-model Malibu to hide its 427 big block from the crowd. Between a Chilean sighting decades ago and a trio of Calgary neighbors who bought sister cars together in 1969, this COPO’s story stretches well past its own build sheet. Watch the full reunion.
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.
The Road Runner and GTX get all the glory from Mopar’s B-body glory days, but the Plymouth Satellite built the platform underneath both of them. Debuting in 1965 with bucket seats and V8 power standard, the Satellite could be optioned all the way to a 425-horsepower 426 Hemi. It’s the same bones as the legends — without the legend price tag.
This 1963 Ford Thunderbird Landau wore its formal-wear styling on purpose, right down to the padded vinyl roof and faux landau bars meant to evoke old coachbuilt luxury cars. A genuine Limited Edition variant that January came in one color combination only, maroon over white, and leaned even harder into the elegance angle. Under all that formality sat a 390 V8 making up to 340 horsepower, plenty for a personal luxury coupe built to cruise rather than race. Ford sold over 12,000 Landaus that year, making this one of the more attainable classic Thunderbirds to find today.
Photographed under moonlight, this 1972 Chevrolet Nova SS represents the exact year Chevrolet trimmed the SS engine lineup down to a single small-block, right as insurance surcharges and emissions rules killed big-blocks industry-wide across Detroit. Nova SS orders actually climbed that year anyway, nearly doubling from the year before. Read on to find out why buyers kept checking the box even as the engine choices narrowed.
David Cach’s TorRed 2015 Dodge Challenger SRT Hellcat beat out a field of nominees to win Hellcat of the Month on the SRT Hellcat Facebook page, no small feat among a community full of 707-horsepower Challengers. Behind that community vote sits genuine engineering history, the first factory-supercharged HEMI Dodge ever built. Read on to find out what actually made the Hellcat program possible.
A vintage 1970 Dodge Challenger R/T commercial has quietly become a cult favorite for reasons that have little to do with horsepower: a blustering, law-enforcement bit built around a Southern sheriff that viewers now recognize as an eerie preview of Buford T. Justice, seven years before Smokey and the Bandit made the archetype famous. Behind the joke sits a genuinely serious muscle car, available with everything from a 383 Magnum up to the 426 Hemi. Watch the full spot to see where the joke started.
Dave’s 1973 Ford XA Falcon Superbird — one of around 750 built — hadn’t run since 1988. Twenty-five years of silence later, the engine finally gets its first crank in this video, with a full restoration promised to follow. For a car this rare, every attempt carries real stakes. Watch to see if it fires.
The Dodge Challenger Hellcat’s supercharged 707-horsepower engine turned nearly every drag strip in the country into an unofficial record chase. Racers like Jason Epling and the HHP-built TopCat pushed the factory-based combination into the 7-second and then 8-second range within a couple of years of its 2015 launch. Read on to find out just how far the same basic engine architecture eventually went.
Ford built the two-seat Thunderbird for just three model years, and 1957 was the last chance to buy one. Most left the factory with a straightforward 292 or 312 V8, but a rare supercharged F-code option pushed a documented 300 horsepower and ran 138 mph at Daytona. Read on to find out how few of these Ford actually built, and why 1958 changed the Thunderbird forever.
Picking nine cars worth talking about out of an auto show floor crammed with hundreds means making hard editorial calls, and The Verge’s walkthrough of the 2018 New York International Auto Show does exactly that, supercars parked next to daily drivers, all narrowed down to a list viewers are still debating. Some picks are the obvious ones. At least one clearly wasn’t. See which vehicles made the cut and how well those calls have aged.