Muscle Car's Test Drive Turns Heads

years, all three of Detroit's auto makers are offering serious muscle cars: big, high-powered, rear-wheel-drive coupes priced to sell in volume.
Ford Motor Co. has never stopped building cars under the Mustang name since the first one debuted in 1965. But the latest generation of Mustangs has revitalized the brand, with styling and performance that are an overt homage to the cars of the late 1960s and early 1970s.
The new Mustangs' success inspired Chrysler LLC and General Motors Corp.'s Chevrolet unit to give chase, repeating the pattern from four decades ago. Chrysler's new Dodge Challenger, a reincarnation of a raffish 1970 model, hit dealerships last fall, just in time for the credit-market collapse and Chrysler's subsequent bankruptcy and sale to the United Auto Workers, Fiat SpA and the federal government.
Now GM's 2010 Chevy Camaro is arriving in showrooms, designed inside and out to remind you of classic late-1960s Camaros—and the days when GM was the Master of the Automotive Universe, not the bankrupt butt of late-night TV scorn.
The main mission for the Camaro, Mustang and Challenger is to part nostalgic baby boomers from their money. That looked like a good bet before the recent market turmoil and energy-price worries. An economic recovery and continued moderate gas prices could still vindicate the decisions to launch these cars.
The new Camaro comes with either a 304-horsepower V-6, starting at about $23,000, or a 426-horsepower V-8, starting at about $31,000. I got a weekend test drive in a "rally yellow" Camaro equipped with a 3.6-liter direct-injection V-6 and a new six-speed automatic transmissionThe new Camaro's ultra-narrow windows and exaggerated hood scoops and fenders give it an all-American bad-boy look. Inside, the dials and gauges look like they were pulled out of the warehouse where they'd been stored since Richard Nixon and Elvis were hanging out at the White House. There's hardly any room in the backseat or the trunk—but so what? The car's styling turned heads everywhere I went.
The V-6 delivered more than enough power for cruising at legal speeds, though the Camaro is better running in a straight line than maneuvering around curves. Among the car's other quirks: The narrow side windows and low-down seating gave me the feeling that I was seated inside an armored vehicle, viewing the world through slits.
In May, the Camaro outsold Co.'s new hybrid, the Insight, by roughly two to one, and Chevy dealers had just 28 days' worth on the lots at the end of the month, according to Autodata Corp. By Chevy standards, that's a sellout. Meanwhile, GM last week said it would kill the slow-selling hybrid version of its Chevy Malibu sedan. These are cautionary signals for the Obama administration's efforts to shift GM's product mix toward smaller, more-efficient vehicles.
The Camaro I drove is rated at 18 miles per gallon city, 29 highway, or about 22 mpg combined. That's great compared to the Camaros of my youth, but it's not in step with President Barack Obama's demand that U.S. car makers boost the average fuel efficiency of their passenger cars to 39 mpg by 2016, compared to 27.5 mpg today.Indeed, tougher federal fuel-economy rules and jumpy gas prices could still ruin the muscle-car party, just as they did in the 1970s.
Based on the complicated new scheme for measuring fuel-economy compliance -- which bases targets on a car's size, or "footprint" -- a car the size of a Ford Mustang would have to hit a fuel-economy target of 30.4 miles per gallon in 2011 and 39.4 miles per gallon in 2016, says Sandy Stojkovski, director of vehicle systems for Ricardo Inc., an engineering consulting firm. The Camaro and Challenger are larger cars, and thus could have less ambitious targets in their class. But the direction is the same; the current V-6 Camaro's 22 mpg probably won't cut it.
Can muscle cars survive such regulatory pressure? Maybe.
In the future, says Jim Hall, an industry consultant, a top-end Camaro or Mustang might have a direct-injection, turbo-charged six-cylinder engine instead of a big V-8. The entry-level models might have turbo-charged, direct-injection four-cylinder motors.
The marketing departments will need to re-educate consumers steeped in the idea that "there's no replacement for displacement," but they could discover that their customers are already ahead of them on that. Ford is using a new sound tube to amplify engine sounds in the cockpit of some Mustangs—a gadget that could be used to create the illusion of a big motor if regulation forces the use of a small one.
Muscle cars must get lighter, too, using high-strength steel, plastic or aluminum to cut pounds, says Mr. Hall. The Camaro and the Challenger, in particular, are heavy cars, he says, because they were built on chassis originally designed for large sedans. To survive long-term, these cars will need to evolve into lighter beasts. That's technically doable -- at a price.
The Detroit car makers' bigger challenge is to convince younger buyers to fall for the allure of the muscle car formula. Fashion in the car business is fickle. But what better way for today's young rebels to declare their scorn for convention than to buy a garish, fossil-fuel-slurping slab of Detroit iron?