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Chevrolet says goodbye to Camaro — for now
Posted by Talbot Payne on December 15, 2023
The Chevrolet Camaro will take its last trip down the assembly line this week, but General Motors Co. isn’t dropping the iconic nameplate forever — even though its sales haven’t always been high-powered.
With Chevy’s dive into electrification, it’s expected the next Camaro will have a battery-powered option, especially since Dodge is ending its gas-powered muscle monsters, the Challenger and Charger. GM and other automakers are trying to figure out what to do with their gas-powered muscle and sports cars in the transition to electric vehicles to meet tightening emissions regulations.
Chevrolet has been mum on what’s next for the sports car, but when the brand declared its demise in March, Scott Bell, Chevy’s vice president, said: “While we are not announcing an immediate successor today, rest assured, this is not the end of Camaro’s story.”
The Detroit News requested interviews with brand leaders about the Camaro’s future but received emailed responses instead. Brad Franz, director of Chevrolet car and crossover marketing, said in a statement this week to The News, “As we’ve said, we’re not announcing an immediate successor at this time. But performance remains an important part of Chevrolet’s DNA.”
Franz added that “at the conclusion of model year 2024, the sixth generation Camaro will have completed a strong nine-year lifecycle. Chevrolet made the decision now as a part of continuously evaluating our portfolio offerings for progress toward our EV future and sales demand.”
Chevrolet is offering the Corvette E-Ray hybrid but still has the gas version of the two-seater sports car it’s produced continuously for 70 years. As Dodge wraps production of the gas-powered Charger and Challenger, the Stellantis muscle-car brand plans to roll out a battery-powered Charger in mid-2024.
Meanwhile, Ford Motor Co. is sticking with its gas-powered Mustang, revealing the seventh generation in 2022, though it also sells the all-electric Mustang Mach-E.
For Camaro to go electric may not be easy “with the skepticism around electrification,” said Ivan Drury, director of insights at Edmunds Inc., a vehicle information website.
But the performance levels of EVs, which offer instant, seamless torque, could be enough for enthusiasts who just want to drive fast.
“There’s so much compromise of owning a sports car that if all you care about is zero-to-60, just buy yourself an EV,” Drury said. “I don’t care what it is. It’ll be fast enough.”
Whatever the powertrain, Karl Brauer, executive analyst at iseecars.com, an automotive research website, is hoping Camaro’s second comeback is better than its first. Chevy halted production of the fourth-generation Camaro after 2002 and brought it back for a fifth generation in 2010.
“I would love to see them do what they should have done the first time around, which is break from the past,” by making a car that just has some subtle references to the previous generations, he said. “Of course, it will be electrified … but styling-wise and drivetrain-wise, there should be no limitations. It should be as new and cutting edge as possible.”
A ‘passion product’ with challenges
The first cancellation of the Camaro came after 35 years of production, beginning with the 1967 model year. When GM announced in 2001 that it was axing the Camaro and the Pontiac Firebird, the automaker said sports car sales had fallen 53% from 1990 to 2000, CNN reported then.
When it came back, Camaro skated to success on the back of its stardom as Bumblebee in “Transformers.” The Camaro performed well in the early 2010s. In 2011, Camaro had a 31% share of the muscle car segment, according to data from Edmunds.
To Franz, the “Camaro is a passion product.”
“It has developed a fan base across the world and has brought people into Chevrolet dealerships for generations,” he said. “The sixth generation specifically represented athleticism and composure — exuding confidence on the road and dominance on the track.”
But Brauer remembers seeing the Camaro’s revived, 2010 version for the first time and feeling disappointed.
“When it first arrived, I wasn’t a fan,” he said. “It looked like a wrong version, or a messed-up version, of a ‘69 Camaro.”
The car also had problems, including visibility issues, an uncomfortable steering wheel and “terrible ergonomics,” Brauer said.
“It was just these little things. There wasn’t any big train-wreck issue,” Brauer said. “If you just kind of looked at it or dealt with it for a long time, it was like, ‘I’m not really a fan.’”
Brauer felt better about the car after its mid-cycle refresh, but he still “didn’t like it.”
“In my mind, it never felt as well-executed as its competitors,” Brauer said. “Mustang and Challenger were just better.”
Sales data from Edmunds show the Camaro’s struggles. Even if it was a shape-shifting star in Michael Bay’s “Transformers” movies, the Camaro consistently failed to surpass its crosstown rivals.
The Camaro has 13% of the market, placing last in the muscle-car segment, which includes the Corvette, Charger, Challenger and Mustang, according to Edmunds’ data. The Charger leads the segment with 33%, followed by Mustang at 20%, Challenger at 19% and Corvette at 14%.
The Camaro’s current market share is better than 2022’s 10% and 2021’s 9% but far from the 20.7% it had in 2017 and the 24.8% share in 2013.
“Camaro production has been closely managed in recent years to maintain healthy demand and has been one of our fastest-turning products,” Frantz said. “The decision to end production of Camaro comes as a result of balancing several business decisions.”
In a filing to the state on Thursday, GM said 369 employees at the Lansing Grand River plant would be laid off because of the loss of the Camaro, which is built there alongside the Cadillac CT4 and CT5 sedans.
The company did say it “anticipates having job opportunities for all impacted team members.”
Under the new United Auto Workers-GM contract ratified in November, the Lansing plant will receive a $1.25 billion investment for future EVs. Details on those EVs have not been released.
Enthusiasts send off an icon
Former Camaro Marketing Manager Scott Settlemire, 69, is known as the “Godfather of the Camaro” for his tireless efforts promoting the muscle car — and then bringing it back to life after its first retirement in 2002.
To GM insiders, he’s known as the “F-bodfather,” since he presided over the last generation of Camaro built on the F-body chassis from 1993 until production halted in 2002.
“It was like losing a member of the family,” recalls Settlemire. But he didn’t give up, helping lead an internal team of Camaro advocates that brought the pony back from the grave in 2010. The fifth-generation model was met with wide acclaim, topping the muscle car sales charts from 2010-14.
Now that the Camaro has been nixed again, Settlemire feels “a similar void.”
“In the current regulatory environment, GM can’t make both a V-8 Corvette and Camaro,” Settlemire, who hung up his GM hat in 2016, said of government rules forcing an end to internal combustion engines by 2035. “I like to say the car is on hiatus. I hope that someone is fighting to keep the Camaro alive inside GM.”
Settlemire, who lives in Mars, Pennsylvania, still owns three Camaros: a red 2010 RS that his mother once drove; a yellow 2008 SS RS manual that was part of the pre-production, fifth-gen test fleet; and a silver 2002 SS Brickyard Festival model in pace car livery.
The license plate on the 2002 SS reads “F-BODFATHER.”
“We’ve lived through this before, and we saw club participation slightly decline,” said Paul Denski, 68, of Plymouth, who is president of the Eastern Michigan Camaro Club. “But when it came back, Chevy hit a home run.”
Like a lot of Camaro faithful, Denski fears it will return as an electric vehicle because of government emissions rules.
“Camaro is a car for America’s back roads. And I don’t see electric chargers coming to the bottom of Tail of the Dragon anytime soon,” said Denski, who has taken frequent trips to Florida in a Camaro — including along the famed, rural, 11-mile section of U.S. 129 through North Carolina. “I don’t like government saying we all have to go EV. I don’t have a choice.”
Denski said the Camaro club will stay healthy “because it’s all about the people you meet. We don’t have a lot of trailer queens — we do a lot of road trips together.” Save for his 2018 COPO Camaro dragster (“I’m too old for that stuff”), he regularly drives his 1967 RS/SS, 2010 2SS, and 2017 ZL1 convertible.
Road trips demand Camaro coupes, and Denski says the value of Camaros all the way back to the first generation remain strong. “There are still 2015 Z28s out there for sale if you want to do the Dragon,” he said of the fire-breathing performance model.
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