CarBrandLogos archive · Chevrolet · 1966

ChevroletCamaro

General Motors had no answer to the Mustang for two and a half years. This was it.

Photo: Kevauto · CC BY-SA 4.0

The story

A defining chapter in Chevrolet history.

Explore the ideas, engineering and context that shaped the Chevrolet Camaro, then continue into its specifications and place in the marque's lineage.

Origins

Ford's Mustang went on sale in April 1964 and outsold every projection. Chevrolet, which had assumed the sporty compact market would stay small, had nothing comparable — the rear-engined Corvair was going the wrong direction entirely — and had to develop a rival from scratch. The Camaro reached showrooms in September 1966 as a 1967 model, sharing its F-body structure with the Pontiac Firebird.

1993Chevrolet Camaro Z28-001 · Rich Niewiroski Jr. · CC BY 2.5

Design and engineering

It was conventional where the Corvair had been adventurous: front engine, rear drive, a unit body with a bolted-on front subframe, and an options list running from a mild six to big-block V8s. The version that mattered for reputation was the Z/28, built to make the car eligible for the Trans-Am racing series, with a high-revving 302-cubic-inch V8 sized to fit under the class limit. Camaros and Mustangs fought that championship through the late 1960s, and the rivalry has never really ended.

Camaro-Transformers03 · Xavigivax · CC BY-SA 3.0

In production

The second generation, from 1970, was longer-lived than anyone intended, running twelve years while emissions rules stripped its power and left it selling on looks alone. Later cars grew heavier and the interiors became a running joke, and in 2002 General Motors closed the plant and killed the name.

Trans-Am-01 · Nathan Bittinger · CC BY 2.0

Legacy

It returned in 2009 on a rear-drive platform derived from Holden engineering, with retro styling and, in the ZL1 and Z/28 versions, genuinely serious hardware — flat-plane track cars and supercharged 650-horsepower coupes among them. The sixth generation was the best-driving Camaro ever made and sold worse than any of them; slow sales, dreadful rear visibility and a collapsing coupe market ended production again in 2023.

At a glance