Why GM Is Killing The Chevy Camaro After 57 Years

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

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.