The End Of Gas Engined Camaro.
From rubber-scented street races to the grass-roots drag strips and tracks of America, the Chevrolet Camaro never shied from a fight. But General Motors' stalwart muscle car, first rushed to show-rooms in 1966 to take on Ford's phenomenally popular Mustang, could not outrun the onslaught of sport utility vehicles and the industry's sprint to electrification.
General Motors announced last month that it would retire the Camaro in January 2024, when a final 2024 model rolls off a Michigan assembly line. "It is a bummer," said Aaron Link, GM's Global Vehicle Performance manager. "The Camaro did everything we wanted it to do, but the car market is just shrinking".
After a long Camaro hiatus, a retro-tinged 2010 comeback model, along with an equally nostalgic Mustang and Challenger, kicked off a new golden age of muscle cars that had enough power, handling and safety to shame any '60s forebear. A star turn as Bumblebee, the shape-shifting Camaro in the Transformers franchise, introduced the Chevy to new buyers.
Many coupe models have been retired. These days, not even two in 100 American buyers choose a sports car. Just four models account for more than 70% of all sports-car sales: the Camaro, Corvette, Mustang and Challenger.
Last year, the Camaro found 24652 buyers, down from 129000 in 2010 and a high of 283000 in 1979.
"The Camaro has become this incredibly sophisticated vehicle, and it's a shame nobody is buying it," said Eddie Alterman, chief brand officer of Hearst Autos and former editor in chief of Car and Driver magazine.
The modern Camaro shares its "Alpha" platform with Cadillac's best sports sedans, including GM's groundbreaking magnetic suspensions, a technology now adopted by Ferrari, Audi and others.
For top Camaros and Shelby Mustangs, the old "muscle car" term hardly applies: These are four-seat sports cars that can meet or beat any big-name European rival, including in the curves.
In 2017, the Camaro ZL1 1LE slayed more giants. The 650-horsepower showroom Camaro wound through Germany's bench-mark 12.9-mile Niirburgring circuit in 7 minutes 16 seconds. That topped several supercars costing three or four times its US$69995 price, including a Ferrari 488 GTB.
In 2021, Elon Musk sent his best 1020-horsepower Testa Model S Plaid to the ring and tweeted an unverified lap time: 14 seconds slower than the humble Chevy, an eternity on track, despite the Tesla's enormous edge in electric horsepower.
The Camaro name isn't bound for the junkyard, with GM executives broadly hinting it will return. But as the automaker vows to phase out internal combustion models by 2035, analysts say, any reconstituted Camaro will surely be an EV or a hybrid.
If the Mustang was a playful ray of sunshine, the 1967 Camaro had a mean streak, especially in hopped-up V-8 editions. Pressed for the origin of the Camaro name, Pete Estes, the Chevy general manager at the time, quipped that it meant "a vicious animal that eats Mustangs."
Priced from US$2966, and US$240 more for a convertible, the Chevy scored a hit with 221000 sales, well off the Mustang's 972000. Just 602 of those were the Z/28 version, a virtual factory-built racecar from a Chevrolet that officially had no racing involvement. Most buyers had no clue this undercover ringer existed, but insiders could order one via a near-secret sequence of option selections that triggered Z/28 factory production.
With backdoor Chevy support, the team owner and newly retired Corvette racer Roger Penske and the driver Mark Donohue soon dominated the rollicking TransAm racecar series. Their first Penske Sunoco Z/28 went to a Pebble Beach auction in 2021 at an estimated value of $1.4 million to $2 million, but did not sell.
By 1975, the Camaro's strongest V-8 was a 155-horsepower peashooter.
If early Camaros were classic boomer rock, a third-generation model — sold from 1982 to 1992 — was '80s hair metal, more meretricious flash and dubious accessories than performance chops. Indignities peaked with the '82 "Iron Duke" Camaro, often cited as among the worst cars ever built, powered by a 90-horsepower four-cylinder engine.
Even a Camaro IROC Z V-8 was a plasticized poseur. Buyers didn't mind, snapping up 262000 Camaros in 1984. The Camaro had become a patron saint of convenience-store parking lots, homecoming dances and extralegal adolescent high jinks, from stoplight races to the odd lawn job.
A streamlined fourth-generation model for 1993 restored legitimacy, including via optional Corvette-based V-8s.
Yet sales of those Camaros dwindled to 29000 in 2001, and Chevy pulled the plug the next year.
Camaro fans may shed a tear at the close of an epic, thrilling chapter, but it appears more a cliff-hanger. Whatever form a future electric Camaro takes, vintage muscle-car fans won't know what hit them.