Missed Opportunities: Six Camaros That Never Saw The Light of Day

The Chevrolet Camaro arrived at the pony party two years late and has been playing catch-up almost ever since. Camaro sales have trailed the Mustang’s for 32 of the 45 years they’ve both been in production; Mustang now leads the U.S. sales race

8.9 million to Camaro’s 5.0 million from inception through the first half of 2016. Might those numbers look different had Chevy management made different design choices? You be the judge.

Editor’s Note: As Chevrolet prepares to celebrate the Camaro’s 50th anniversary this month, we’ll be publishing a few stories Camaro fans won’t want to miss — stay tuned.

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Camaro Nomad

Rumor had it that Ford might be working up a Conestoga Mustang, so Chevy whipped up this first-gen wagon borrowing the ’55 Nomad’s fast C- and D-pillars. Nothing goes to waste, though—that roof saw production in the ’71-’76 full-size GM clam-back wagons.

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XP-873 Mini Camaro

This sporty two-door hatch explored an idea to take the Camaro look and feel downscale as a cheap and cheerful 2+2 VW Beetle competitor, possibly wearing Corvair sub-branding (though it was a water-cooled front-engine/rear-drive design). Many cues found a home on the Beetle-battling Vega.

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Second-Gen Italianate Study

This photo, dated August 19, 1969, illustrates a potential refresh of the second-gen Camaro, preserving the sharp undercut of its lower body side, morphing to a hidden-headlamp style, and reintroducing the rear quarter windows. Elements of the rear-end design may have inspired the Vega-replacing Monza.

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F-14 Tomcat IROC-Z

Car design mostly left airplane imagery behind in the ’50s, but this concept, named for the famous warplane, features a fighter-canopy greenhouse and vestigial delta wings sprouting from its rockers. The 1993 Camaro featured toned-down interpretations of many Tomcat cues but nixed the winglets.

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1989 Advance Concept Center IROC-Z Concept

GM’s Advance Concept Center in Newbury Park, California, got the task of designing a concept car for the show circuit that would prepare buyers for the radical redesign of the fourth-gen Camaro. Its rear overhang is shorter and its prow pointier, but it certainly captures the look of the final product.

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GMX282

This dead-end fifth-gen clay model evokes few if any cues from Camaros past and shares its size and proportion with the Zeta-platform-based Holden Coupe 60 concept that was destined to become a Pontiac GTO. The production design, inspired by the ’69 Camaro, logged five of those Mustang-trumping sales years.

Which Camaro that never saw the light of day is your favorite? Tell us in the comments below.

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