The Chevrolet Camaro is in its sixth generation now, with a storied reputation and nearly 6 million built since the first one came off the line in Ohio (or maybe it was California, depending on your definition of “first”) in the fall of 1966. Sadly, American car shoppers no longer love the Camaro as they once did; sales are so weak that GM has announced that production will cease after 2024. Today’s Junkyard find is a car seldom found in car graveyards these days: an example of the very first model year of the Camaro.
Ford scored a tremendous sales hit in 1964 by basing a sporty-looking small car on the Falcon’s platform. The Mustang printed bales of money for Dearborn, and the Chevy Corvair Monza just wasn’t able to lure away many potential Mustang customers. Something had to be done, and so The General followed the Mustang’s playbook by taking the Falcon’s GM rival (the Chevy Nova) and using its chassis as the starting point for a new sporty-looking small car. The Camaro and its Pontiac sibling, the Firebird, were born.
The first-generation (1967-1969) Camaro was a sales hit, with better than 200,000 sold in each of those three years. Those numbers didn’t come very close to beating the Mustang, but the Camaro continued to sell well throughout the 1970s and 1980s. Because so many of the early Camaros got hooned to death (or just used up as everyday cheap commuters) and the survivors are now quite valuable, I had never documented a first- or second-generation example in this series prior to today’s car. In fact, the oldest Camaro I’d photographed before now was an Iron Duke-powered ’83. I’ve seen 1967-1981 Camaros during my 2007-2023 junkyard travels, naturally, but all were either unrecognizable wrecks or picked-clean shells, not qualified for this series.
This car is stashed away with some other interesting classics in the far reaches of a legendary old-school boneyard located just off the highway between Denver and Cheyenne. Yes, that’s a late-1960s Chevelle behind the Camaro, with a very early Bronco further back. I suspect that these vehicles may be part of a special reserve, maybe available for parts or whole purchase, maybe not.
I couldn’t open the hood without risking damage from the rusted-in-position hinges (part of the Junkyard Code is that you don’t bend the hoods of restorable classic cars by trying to force open stuck hinges), so I can’t say what engine is in this car. The most likely candidates are the base 230-cubic-inch (3.8-liter) “Turbo-Thrift” straight-six and the 327-cubic-inch (5.4-liter) “Turbo-Fire” small-block V8, but bigger sixes and eights were available as options. We can see that the transmission is a column-shifted Powerglide two-speed automatic. While the Powerglide is an incredibly sturdy gearbox, I can say from personal experience that it’s not much fun to drive unless you have really big horsepower.
Will this car ever get back on the road? Being a first-year Camaro, there’s a good chance. We can assume it will get flashy billet wheels and a crate LS swap if it comes back to life, but that’s better than going to The Crusher.
The Camaro will whip the Mustang to death!
Don’t worry, a little lady can feel free to bash the new Camaro into every obstacle she sees… without harming the resilient bumpers.