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.
Chevrolet never quite decided if the El Camino was a car or a truck, and in 1970 that identity crisis produced one of the strangest muscle car footnotes in Detroit history. For most of the 1960s, GM capped its mid-size performance cars at 400 cubic inches, keeping the biggest big-blocks locked inside full-size cruisers and the Corvette. Then, for one single model year, that internal rule disappeared — and Chevrolet dropped a 450-horsepower LS6 454 into a vehicle with a cargo bed. Only a few hundred buyers ever ordered one. A recent deep-dive from restoration channel Raiti’s Rides revisits the 1970 El Camino SS and makes the case that, pickup bed and all, it might be the most unusual muscle car Detroit ever built.
The video walks through why this generation of El Camino sits in such a strange corner of muscle car history — neither a true car nor a true truck, but Chevrolet’s attempt to have it both ways. Built on the same A-body platform as the 1970 Chevelle, the El Camino shared its front clip, dashboard, cowl, and drivetrain options with one of the most celebrated muscle cars ever made, right down to the same Super Sport badge on the fender.
That shared DNA is what makes the SS package so interesting. Order a 1970 El Camino with the SS 396 package — which, despite the badge, actually displaced 402 cubic inches that year — and you got a 350-horsepower big-block wearing a familiar number. Order the SS 454 instead, and depending on which version of the engine was checked on the order sheet, buyers got either the base LS5’s 360 horsepower or the range-topping LS6’s 450 horsepower and roughly 500 pound-feet of torque, good for a 0-60 run in the 5-second range and a quarter mile in the low 13s. It was the same engine GM was dropping into its most serious Chevelles that same year.
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None of that would have existed at all if Chevrolet hadn’t been playing catch-up a decade earlier. Ford launched the coupe-pickup concept first, introducing the Ranchero in late 1956 for the 1957 model year by chopping the roof off a full-size Ford wagon behind the front doors. Chevrolet didn’t answer until 1959, building its first El Camino off the smaller Brookwood two-door wagon platform with trim borrowed from the Bel Air. The gamble worked — Chevrolet sold 22,246 El Caminos that debut year against roughly 14,169 Rancheros, and while the nameplate briefly disappeared for the early ’60s, it came back for good in 1964 riding on the Chevelle platform, setting up exactly the muscle-car-adjacent identity the SS models would exploit by the end of the decade.
The Rule GM Broke to Build It
None of this would have been possible a year earlier. Through most of the 1960s, GM enforced an internal rule capping engines in its mid-size “intermediate” cars at 400 cubic inches, keeping the biggest big-blocks reserved for full-size models. That corporate ceiling was lifted for the 1970 model year alone, and Chevrolet moved quickly to drop the 454-cubic-inch big-block into the Chevelle SS — and, because it rode on the same platform and shared the same options sheet, into the El Camino as well. It was the only year Chevrolet’s half-car, half-truck could be ordered with the same LS6 big-block found under the hood of a 1970 Chevelle SS454.
The Rarest El Camino Chevrolet Ever Built
Few buyers took Chevrolet up on the offer. Across all of GM in 1970, roughly 4,500 cars left the factory with the LS6 engine, and El Camino production accounts for only a small slice of that total. Most enthusiast and marque-club sources put the number of LS6-equipped El Caminos built that year at around 500, though some records suggest a slightly higher count closer to 544 — the exact figure has never been definitively nailed down. Either way, it’s a fraction of the tens of thousands of El Caminos Chevrolet sold in 1970, which makes a documented, numbers-matching LS6 truck one of the rarest big-block muscle cars of the entire era, rarer in raw numbers than plenty of cars that draw far more attention at auction.
That scarcity shows up clearly in what these cars bring today. A standard 1970 El Camino tends to change hands for somewhere in the low five figures, with recent public sales landing around $32,000 on average and topping out in the high $80,000s for exceptional examples. Verified LS6 cars live in an entirely different bracket: one documented, numbers-matching SS454 LS6 has been listed as high as $199,500, and the top recorded sale for a 1970 El Camino at auction sits north of $286,000 — a lumber-hauling work truck outpricing plenty of six-figure sports cars.
Half Car, Half Truck, All Muscle
What made the El Camino strange wasn’t the engine — it was everything around it. Chevrolet built the El Camino as a “coupe utility,” grafting a pickup bed onto a two-door coupe body, a format the company had first tried in 1959, dropped, and revived in 1964. By 1970, the El Camino shared its cowl, doors, dashboard, and front sheet metal directly with the Chevelle, and buyers could option it almost exactly like a Chevelle SS: bucket seats, a floor-shifted four-speed, F41 suspension, and the SS’s own domed hood with a vacuum-operated cowl-induction scoop that only popped open under hard acceleration. The only real giveaway from the driver’s seat was the bed out back.
That duality is exactly why the Raiti’s Rides video argues the 1970 El Camino SS deserves a real look from muscle car buyers rather than a footnote. Chevrolet was willing to put its most serious engine options into a vehicle that, on paper, looked like a work truck — a combination that doesn’t really exist anywhere else from the era: genuine LS6 or big-block 396 performance, a four-speed manual and Positraction rear end on the options sheet, wrapped around a cargo bed that could still haul a load of lumber home from the yard. Viewers weighing in on the video echo the same point again and again — plenty grew up seeing these parked in driveways across the country, and more than one commenter is still chasing down the one they always wanted.
Watch the full video above and let us know your thoughts in the comments.
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