It is one of the great American pony cars.
Chevrolet's Answer to the Ford Mustang.
It has been a fixture of American racing, a track
ready, V8 powered beast.
The car has inspired fierce passion among fans.
My wife was sitting with me, I said, "we're going to
get that car."
People name their Camaros.
There are people that collect them.
I like to say you can never have too many.
But now it's going away and it's unclear if it will ever
come back in different shape or form.
They would like to be 100% light vehicle electric by
2035. So, yeah, every decision that's made
regarding the product portfolio from now until
then will be defined by that.
So why did GM decide to put one of the most iconic
American sports cars of all time to rest?
And what does the future hold for the Chevrolet
Camaro and its fans?
I got my Camaro in 2009.
I did that after watching the Transformers movie.
When I saw that car change in the tunnel from the
second gen into the fifth gen and my wife was sitting
with me, I said, "we're going to get that car."
Francisco Mercado, who goes by Cisco, is a gearhead and
car fan.
My first car was a VW 1965 VW Bug.
I learned how to drive stick shift on that car, and
since then I've had so many cars I can't even count.
He's had Mustangs, Dodges and Camaros.
That's his big love.
Ever since that Transformers movie nearly 15
years ago.
Now he is the president of New York Fifth Gen, a club
filled with fellow Camaro fans who collect, modify,
wrench and bond over what they consider to be the
coolest, most fun car on the road.
Sadly for these fans, though, the Camaro, as they
know it, will soon be gone.
Released in 1966.
The Camaro was GM's answer to the Ford Mustang in the
then-nascent domestic sports car segment.
These were gas-guzzling, stylish, muscular cars meant
for racing, cutting loose or simply attracting
attention like its rival.
It was intended as a sports car for the people.
The 1960s and 70s were the era for high performance
sedans, sometimes called muscle cars and smaller
coupes, sometimes called pony cars.
The Camaro and Mustang were the latter.
The car rolled into dealerships for the first
time on September 29th, 1966.
It sold 221,000 units that year, though it was a
success, it was only about half the Mustangs sold in
1964, the first year that vehicle was sold.
However, over the years, the Camaro has made its own
stamp on history.
We focus a little bit more on the whole driving
experience. It's not- it hasn't been just a
straight-line car.
Camaros have been great handling cars, fun to drive,
you know, everything from the latest zl1, you know,
going to Nurburgring, things like that, showing
that it can, you know, stretch beyond just what
people think of as the muscle car.
It can go up against true high-performance sports cars
from anywhere.
From the beginning, the car was closely connected with
racing, like the Indy 519 67 and 1969.
The tradition continued for generations.
The Z28 was introduced in 1967.
Camaro's best year was 1979, 282,571 sold and
85,000 of them were z28s.
Camaro has always been about affordable performance.
Really. It's a two-door coupe or convertible and you
get you get reasonably and then the base car, you get
reasonable power, but you also get these really great
v-8s.
That said, Camaros can be expensive.
Zl1 can sell for $80,000 with the 1LE track package.
They're not necessarily cheap, but they're cheaper
than than than a lot of sort of luxury sports cars
or they're cheaper than a Corvette. Right?
They're cheaper than a Porsche. They're cheaper
than a Ferrari. But still, they're dynamic.
They're exciting.
They certainly do project an aura of youthfulness and,
you know, of attitude and and a little bit of like
we're we're out to have fun and we're out to go get
there. I think it really does does cross sort of
income levels. It crosses minorities, it crosses
gender, it crosses all walks of life.
However, the car is not known as the easiest to live
with in its segment.
The Camaro is notorious for having rather poor
visibility. Outlets like Consumer Reports have noted
it as one of the worst in its category.
You've got some compromises in terms of what you can do
with the vehicle, but it's all worth it when you're
driving it.
This is not the first time the Camaro has been
discontinued. Declining sales led GM to pull it off
the market in 2002.
Scott Settlemire was a product manager for Camaro
and ran auto shows for General Motors.
He's also worked closely with the Camaro fan
community online.
I lobbied Strong to get it to come back into the
portfolio, and so we finally brought it back.
We showed the concept in January of 2006, and I was
able to invite 250 Camaro enthusiasts to the unveiling
at the North American International Auto Show in
Detroit. And when we unveiled it, I had
full-grown men burst into tears.
I think there was such an outcry from the Camaro
enthusiasts and things that it's always been it was
always in the back of our minds to bring that back.
And we did that.
Beautiful show car 2006, which kind of brought back
some of the heritage, you know, Camaro kind of a
little bit of this of the 69 Camaro in there.
And when that was shown, it was shown as a concept.
But once it was shown in the enthusiasts, we have to
get that to production.
And basically it became it was an early 2010 model
where we came out in 2009 and and that was a big hit.
61,000 units sold in 2009 when it was introduced again
through 2014.
Sales were consistently in the 80,000 range, and this
time it sold better than its rival, Mustang.
But by 2019, sales had fallen to about 48,000, the
lowest in years, and it lagged far behind
competitors. There are a few reasons why this
happened. First of all, people just aren't buying
sports cars like they used to.
By 2010, the infiltration of the crossover utility
vehicle was well underway, and since then, the segment
has taken over. Cars made up 43% of all sales in 2010.
In 2022, they made up 19%.
Sports cars already a niche segment at just over 5% of
the market in 2010, were less than 2% in 2022.
Crossovers broadly described are vehicles that
include elements of cars such as unibody
construction, but look more like sport utilities.
Those have gone from 25% of the market to almost 50%.
Pickup trucks have also gained share from 14% to
almost 20%.
If you add up trucks, SUVs and crossovers, that's
three-quarters of the market.
I'm kind of old school hardcore.
I love sports cars, you know, like the Camaro and
the Corvette. But, you know, the SUV design, you
know, crossover, they do so many things.
Well, the Camaro sold 24,652 units in 2022.
While that is a 12.6 increase from 2021 compared
to the Chevrolet Silverado, it's a fraction GMC Sierra
Cadillac Escalade.
Pretty much all of GM's best selling vehicles are
pickup trucks and SUVs.
The Corvette, Camaro's pricier sports car sibling
outsold the Camaro by only about 10,000 units, Making
the case for a sports car with a big V8 engine is also
getting harder. Another reason the Camaro has
declined in popularity.
There are a lot of things changing.
Obviously there's a lot of regulations coming the way
with emissions and fuel economy and things like that
that have to be balanced going forward.
The Biden administration has released the toughest fuel
economy regulations ever Stellantis, a GM competitor
saw the writing on the wall. They planned to end
production of the gasoline-burning version of
the Challenger, which outsold both the Mustang and
the Camaro in 2022.
So far, the plan seems to be a fully electric vehicle.
For now, Ford has kept its two-door Mustang, but has
also attached the Mustang brand to a four-door
electric crossover called the Mach e Chevy unveiled a
hybrid version of its Corvette in January 2023.
Every year, the federal government releases a report
that ranks the fleet-wide fuel efficiency and CO2
emissions of every automaker selling cars in
the US in 2021.
The most recent data available, Dodge parent
Stellantis, was ranked the worst, followed by GM and
Ford. Despite its plans to aggressively push into EVs.
GM's corporate average fuel economy actually dropped
from the previous year.
Those new Biden rules, those require an average of
49 miles per gallon across an automaker's fleet by
2026, more than twice that of GM's fleet wide average.
The Camaro gets an average of about 25 miles per gallon
for the four cylinder, but that quickly drops to 16
miles per gallon for the V8 version.
That is for a car that makes up a tiny share of
GM's US sales just over 1%.
They do have to meet more and more strict regulations,
so the decision has to be made.
Does this vehicle fit within that space?
Do we have enough offset credits?
Are we just going to pay a fine for having it?
And how does that fit in that broader portfolio?
Finally, the Camaro might also just be a casualty of
the tough times the auto industry has had to endure
in the last few years.
Camaro production was affected by the 2019 GM
workers strike, which cost GM about $4 billion that
year. A lot more money than investors had expected.
Then, plants were shut down in 2020 and supply chain
shortages plagued the industry in 2021 and 2022.
GM had to make difficult decisions as to what they
were going to build.
And with that, with that plant, it wasn't that easy
to turn it back on just to build Camaros and keep that
plant running at a good space.
The challenge is that in killing the Camaro, GM is
pulling an iconic brand name with a loyal and
enthusiastic fan base behind it.
It's tough to get a sticky brand name, and so you could
see a reincarnation or a rebranding of this same name
under but under EV or an SUV brand, for sure.
Yeah.
Chevy's going to remain a performance brand.
You know, we're going to still be racing, you know,
Camaro is going to stay active in in racing for the
future. Evs are going to be
high-performance. You know we have models, we have
models on other products.
A future Camaro EV is likely.
That's the direction everyone seems to be moving
in direct competitors and the larger industry,
including GM itself.
Camaro is currently built on the same platform and at
the same plant as some of the Cadillac vehicles.
And the plan so far is to take that brand electric.
This one's kind of run its course and we'll move on to
whatever's next. They're not making any statements or
or proclamations of what's happening.
But, you know, we don't think this is the end of
Camaro's chapter in history or Camaro story, just like
we've done in the past. It had a little bit of a hiatus
and when we had the right technology, we'll come
forward and bring it back.
If you look at the EV side, startup margins, operating
margins are somewhere in the -30, -40 for a lot of
the electric vehicle OEMs.
And so there is a long road ahead in trying to get those
margins back to the 10 to 15% operating margins that
Tesla has.
GM, like most legacy automakers, is not making
money on EVs.
It expects to make single-digit profits on its
EV portfolio by 2025.
As you move the portfolio, how do you balance the 90%
of your portfolio that is declining on the combustion
engine side and slowly increase the electric
vehicle portfolio? That's, you know, let's say sub 10%
to 30%, but it's a massive profitability drag on you.
So, um, so I think that is a very that's a tightrope
that it's a balancing act for, for GM and that's why
we kept it neutral because they first need to get to
profitability on the side.
GM is also ramping up its EV portfolio at a time of
brutal price competition.
Tesla is cutting prices everywhere globally.
And at the same time, you have the other OEMs are
trying to come in.
They have they are starting off with fairly negative
profitability on the EV side.
The market, especially for high-performance,
high-priced EVs, is crowded.
Longtime rivals are either jumping in or broadcasting
their plans.
A lot of the low-hanging fruit is probably getting
taken out by Tesla, given that they were first to
market. And so as you try to penetrate the market
more, you need to bring pricing down.
The average price of an EV was just over $61,000 in
2022. That's just a few thousand lower than the
average price of a luxury vehicle as of May 2023.
Camaros start at $26,000.
Gm has pledged to sell a lot of EVs at mainstream
prices. The automaker is targeting about $30,000 for
its upcoming Chevrolet Equinox, EV, for example,
but that is still over $3,000 more than the base
price for the internal combustion version.
Then, of course, there is the issue of charging 1 in 4
car buyers considering an EV don't have and can't
install charging at home, for example.
Then, there is the experience of driving the
car.
It has to have a Camaro sound.
Now, I don't know how you do that with an electric
motor.
Electric motors not only produce different sounds,
they drive differently.
The weight is balanced differently because there is
no engine. Instead, there is a huge heavy battery at
the base of the car.
Electric motors deliver power differently.
There is instant torque, the kind that can throw
people back into their seats. Fans are taking GM at
its word that this is not the end of the Camaro's
story.
What I would say to the average Camaro guy today is
keep the faith, the car is coming back and you won't be
disappointed.
It's going to come back.
But what form is it going to come back in?
It has to appeal to the Camaro owners.
It'll be electric and you'll have some people
dragging their feet and kicking and crying.
No, I don't want I don't want. But I guarantee you
when they get into that car and they feel the power and
they feel the torque without no noise, but
they'll have to get used to that.