Pontiac expected to sell about 5,000. By the end of the 1964 model year, buyers had ordered 32,450 Tempests with the GTO package, a $295 option that put a big-car V8 into a mid-size body. It was not the first fast American car, and it was not the first big engine in a smaller car. But it was the one that sold, in numbers nobody at Pontiac had planned for. A Way Around the Rules…
In 1982, Chevrolet took the formula of its big K5 Blazer, cut it down and put it on a compact pickup chassis. The result…
For more than two decades, the Camaro that Paul Walker’s character jumped onto a yacht at the end of 2 Fast 2 Furious sat…
In the early 1980s, the American V8 was in trouble. Emissions rules and fuel economy targets had squeezed the big engines hard. Detroit’s engineers…
Ask anyone to name an American muscle car and you will hear the same handful: GTO, Chevelle SS, Road Runner, Mustang, Camaro, Charger. They…
Detroit in the 1950s and early 1960s had a strange habit. It built its plainest, cheapest family cars, the ones with rubber mats and…
The 1959 Chevrolet looked like nothing else on the road, with gull-wing fins, cat’s-eye taillights and eyebrows over the grille. For 1960, Chevrolet calmed…
In 1956, a Mercury buyer could get a 312-cubic-inch V8 and a rubber floor mat in the same car. No carpet, no bumper guards,…
On July 7, 1959, Ford photographed a prototype compact station wagon with large EDSEL letters on its side. Four months later, the Edsel brand…
The Edsel is remembered as the car nobody wanted. That is only half the story. When Ford decided to build it, nearly everyone in…
