Chevy Camaro Origin Story: Aldan American

The Mustang Fighter

General Motors was pretty much flat-footed when Ford rolled out its sporty, two-door, long-hood, short-deck Mustang in 1964. Mustang sales soared. At the end of the 1965 model year, Ford had sold nearly half a million Mustangs.

GM didn’t have anything in its showrooms to match the Mustang. The only thing GM had was the Chevy II, which included the Nova. No matter how hard you stared at it, it didn’t look like any kind of sports―or sporty―car.

Chevy knew it HAD to respond quickly. But more than that, it had to strive for a knockout blow to the Mustang. Here was their reasoning:

The Mustang, which was setting sales records, would have been around several years by the time Chevy could bring a competitor to market.
The new “Mustang Fighter” from GM would have to beat the Mustang on several levels to garner attention, and it had to be superior in looks, handling and performance.

There wasn’t time for starting from scratch, so Chevy engineers decided to use the Chevy II/Nova, an economy car rolled out in 1962, as the platform for their new challenge to the Mustang. The first Camaros shared many of their chassis elements with the Nova.

What’s in a name?

The name for the new car, by the way, hadn’t been decided upon in the beginning. In development, it started out as project XP-836 and had also been referred to as the “F-body”…it was referred to as “Panther” for a long time, right up until the last minute when the new name was announced. Chevy had even teased the press with the name at one point.

By September 1966, the new Chevy was introduced to the world and was in showrooms for buyers.

It was called Camaro.

Want to know more? Read the rest Aldan’s excellent article here.