All About Cars

The doors opened, and people mobbed around. They snapped pictures, filmed video and swooned. A security guard stood watch, making sure none of the oglers got too close to the machine.

“American muscle, man,” said one admirer, as he crouched down to stare. “Look at those lines, that grill,” gushed a teenage boy. “It’s about time,” added several other men.

Behold the Chevrolet Camaro concept car. Boasting a 400-horsepower V8 engine, a retro design and an interior said to be inspired by fighter jets, the shiny red toy drew crowds Saturday at the Utah International Auto Expo.

“Chick magnet,” announced Adam Trask, 25, of Provo, who could barely take his eyes off the bulging steel.

But many of the women standing nearby didn’t get the attraction. Some shrugged when asked what they thought.

“It’s not exciting to me,” said one woman, whose 18-year-old son had just finished taking photos. “I just sort of came along because I’m the grandma,” said Peggy Margetts, a West Jordan woman who was enjoying family time.

For Rex Bennett, 51, and his family, it was love at first sight.

“When I laid eyes on it, I said, ‘Oh man, that’s the best-looking car I’ve ever seen,’ ” said the Lehi resident, who’s already put down deposits for two. “I like the rear end on it.”

His wife, Debbi, will benefit from Bennett’s “his and hers” purchase and hopes the car will come in purple. Their 13-year-old daughter, Wendi, also hopes to reap benefits.

“You have to drive me to the mall so the boys can see it,” she told her parents.

The Camaro, a mainstay muscle car since 1967, was taken out of production in 2003. Since talk of its reintroduction started two years ago, those who grew up coveting the car have anticipated its return, which won’t be until early 2009. In fact, Michael Christensen of Murdock Chevrolet in Woods Cross said he’s already taken $1,000 deposits for 21 of them. The first guy in line, he added, reserved four. No price has been set.

Added his colleague, Stephen Petersen, “We’re just hoping the hype isn’t gone by the time it really comes out.”

Chevrolet Camaro is a great looking coupe showing a nice combination of modern and retro styling.

One of the best surprises on display at the 2007 Melbourne Motor Show is the Chevrolet Camaro concept car. The coupe is on the Holden stand and is a great looking machine with a nice amalgam of early 21st century styling and a late 1960s muscle car.

Just look at the long bonnet and short tail and the way in which the distinctive guards follow the lines of the wheels.

Though only the concept is being shown at this stage, Chevrolet has already confirmed that the new Camaro will definitely go into production, so the lines we see here can’t be too far off the real deal.

First sales in the USA will be early in 2009. Even better, Chevrolet has announced it is also going to build convertible version of the new Camaro and launch it later that year.

Holden is, of course, a division of GM and a considerable amount of development work on the new Chevrolet is being done right here in Australia. This country is regarded as one of the world’s best within the GM empire, even more so after the success of the VE Commodore.

It goes without saying that this American sporty model will have a longitudinal front engine and rear wheel drive, just like Commodore, so our engineers are heavily involved in the new Chevrolet. This presumably happening at Fisherman’s Bend as I write this, with testing of prototypes to follow at Lang Lang in the not too distant future.

The mechanical layout of the new Camaro will be very familiar to Holden fans. Not only are the engine and differential in the right place from their point of view, but the car also features a 6.0-litre LS2 V8 engine and T56 six-speed manual gearbox sound. Chevrolet tells us it will also produce the vehicle in a lower-cost format with a V6 engine.

Will this new Camaro be sold in Australia, and if so will it carry Chevrolet badges, or Holden ones? If it was the latter, could this be Australians’ first glimpse of the next Monaro?

The answer to all of the above is yet to be revealed by GM-Holden. But the concept Camaro hasn’t been air freighted here just for the fun of it. The attitude of the Australian public to the car at the Melbourne Motor Show will certainly taken very seriously by the marketing people. If you want to have your say it might be an idea to get to the Show as soon as possible.

The new Camaro appeared at the Detroit Motor Show in January 2007 and was an instant hit, and the big news is that the car is going into production almost unaltered.

The 2009 Chevrolet Camaro SS is based on GM’s Zeta platform, which underpins Australia’s Holden Commodore and the new Pontiac GTO as well as the Pontiac G8. The Zeta platform was designed from the start to be adaptable, and so far it looks as if it’s going to spread through most of GM’s brands.

The Zeta platform is also remarkably stiff, and is the ideal basis for the Camaro. The platform can be altered for wheelbase, so the 2009 Chevrolet Camaro SS is not going to be merely a Holden Commodore with a couple of doors taken off (that would be the new Pontiac GTO).

“The new Camaro will be almost identical to the concept, a thoroughly modern interpretation of the 1969 model, considered by many to be the best design of the car’s first generation,” said Ed Welburn, GM’s global vice president of design, who actually owns a 1969 Camaro SS.

The new car will feature multi link independent rear suspension and there will be choices of manual and automatic gearboxes, as well as V6 and V8 engines. The gearboxes will likely be the same six speed manual and six speed auto found in the Holden Commodore.

The Camaro was deigned by a particularly young group of designers, ranging in age from 27 to 35, but they all grew up with a common passion for American performance cars.

Nearly 4.8 million Camaros have been sold between the car’s introduction in 1967 and 2002, when production of the iconic vehicle ended, and there are more than one thousand Camaro clubs around the world.

The standard V6 model will use the 3.6 liter version of GM’s global V6, tuned to between 240 horsepower and 260 horsepower, while the V8 option will most likely be the 6.2 liter version of the GEN VI with around 400 horsepower. But GM is also currently working on a direct injection version of the V8, gaining more horsepower while increasing fuel economy from between three to six percent, and Dave Sczomak, development engineer-GM Powertrain Advanced Engineering, says the technology will bump power to “well over 450HP.” That engine may well make an appearance in the Camaro, either in the standard car or the SS model.

Either way, the SS version will be stripped out for lightweight performance. Expect the SS to weigh somewhere between 350 to 500 pounds less than the V8 Camaro for a 0-60 time around a tenth of a second or so better than the standard V8.

The all-new 2009 Chevrolet Camaro SS will begin with early production versions right at the end of 2008 and will hit the streets in the first quarter of 2009. But it’s not going to be an entirely US car, as the Camaro will be built at the Oshawa #2 car plant, part of GM’s award-winning, Oshawa assembly plant complex in Canada.