GM to stop making Camaro; successor possible
DETROIT — The Chevrolet Camaro, for decades the dream car of many teenage American males, is going out of production.
General Motors, which sells the brawny muscle car, said Wednesday it will stop making the current generation early next year.
The future of the car, which is raced on NASCAR and other circuits, is a bit murky. GM says another generation may be in the works.
“While we are not announcing an immediate successor today, rest assured, this is not the end of Camaro’s story,” Scott Bell, vice president of Chevrolet, said in a statement.
The current sixth-generation Camaro, introduced in 2016, has done well on the racetrack, but sales have been tailing off in recent years. When the current generation Camaro came out in 2016, Chevrolet sold 72,705 of them. But by the end of 2021 that number fell almost 70% to 21,893. It rebounded a bit last year to 24,652.
GM said the last of the 2024 model year of the cars will come off the assembly line in Lansing, Michigan, in January.
GM has said it plans to sell only electric passenger vehicles worldwide by 2035.
Brinley said the push to sell more electric vehicles makes it likely that all new muscle cars will be powered by batteries. But if there’s still a mixed combustion and battery fleet on sale in 2030 or 2040, some gas-powered muscle cars could survive.
GM’s move comes as traditional gas-powered muscle cars are starting to be phased out due to strict government fuel economy regulations, concerns about climate change and an accelerating shift toward electric vehicles.
Electric cars, with instant torque and a low center of gravity, often are faster and handle better than internal combustion vehicles.
The Camaro was first introduced in 1966, two years after Ford’s wildly popular Mustang.