Ask anyone to name an American muscle car and you will hear the same handful: GTO, Chevelle SS, Road Runner, Mustang, Camaro, Charger. They earned their reputations. But the late 1960s and early 1970s produced dozens of other cars with the same big engines and, in some cases, better numbers, and most of them never got the same fame. “Underrated” is a judgment, so here is how this list was built. Every car on it…

Detroit in the 1950s and early 1960s had a strange habit. It built its plainest, cheapest family cars, the ones with rubber mats and dog-dish hubcaps, and then let buyers order the biggest engine in the catalog for them. Sometimes that was for racing rules. Sometimes it was simply because the order form allowed it. The result was a generation of sleepers. Here are eight of them, in the order they appeared, with a note…

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 it down. The advertising promised “everybody’s kind of elegance,” and the car underneath the new sheet metal was nearly the same. Calm did not mean slow. The same 1960 Chevrolet that wore the quieter styling could still be ordered with a 348-cubic-inch V8, three two-barrel carburetors and 335 horsepower. And Chevrolet…

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, no radio unless he paid for one, and often not even a heater. The car was called the Medalist, and it was Mercury’s attempt to sell its size and power to buyers who usually stopped at the Ford dealer. It did not last. Mercury dropped the name after one season, brought…

On July 7, 1959, Ford photographed a prototype compact station wagon with large EDSEL letters on its side. Four months later, the Edsel brand was dead. The car was not. It reached showrooms on March 17, 1960, under a different name: Comet. It had no Edsel badge and, for its first two years, no Mercury badge either. And in a model year that lasted only from March to October, it found 116,331 buyers. By Thomas…

The Edsel is remembered as the car nobody wanted. That is only half the story. When Ford decided to build it, nearly everyone in Detroit wanted exactly this kind of car. The mid-priced market was booming, Buick was selling more cars than ever, and Ford had no direct answer. The problem was the calendar. Ford approved the project in the spring of 1955. The car reached showrooms in September 1957. In those two and a…

Look at a 1957 Ford Custom 300 today and you see a family sedan. Two doors or four, a bench seat, armrests and a pair of sun visors. It was not the Fairlane 500, not the Skyliner with its folding steel roof, not the car on the brochure cover. It was, however, one of the cars that did something no Ford had managed in more than twenty years. In 1957, Ford outsold Chevrolet. And on…

Mercury’s advertising for 1955 made a bold promise: “You don’t have to look twice to tell it’s a Mercury!” Underneath, the car shared its body structure with the Ford. On the outside, much of its look came from Lincoln and from a show car that had appeared in Chicago a year earlier. That mix worked better than anything Mercury had sold before. The division built 329,808 cars for 1955, a record and an increase of…

For more than two decades, a Buick meant a straight eight. Long hood, long crankshaft, smooth and unhurried. Then came 1954, and that tradition ended in a single model year. Every Buick on the showroom floor, from the cheapest Special to the Roadmaster, now had an overhead-valve V8 and a new body, longer, lower and wider than before. Buick’s advertising called it “the beautiful buy.” It was more than a slogan. The 1954 line brought…

One-owner, factory blue, numbers-matching — the last of the Ford-era Panteras emerges untouched Every now and then, a barn find shows up that makes you drop your coffee. This one’s a 1974 De Tomaso Pantera — one owner, parked in the mid-’80s, and pulled back into the light looking like somebody hit pause on a VCR and just now remembered to hit play. Four Decades in the Dark The car was bought new, driven for…