General Motors announced Wednesday that it’s ending production of the latest generation of the Chevrolet Camaro, leaving the Ford Mustang as the last gasoline-powered American performance coupe.
Stellantis had earlier announced it would stop production of the larger Dodge Challenger at the end of this year. Around the same time, Dodge executives revealed an electric muscle car concept car that, they said, provided a preview of a future model.
GM has not announced any future versions of the Camaro, although it teased that there will be some future for the brand.
“While we are not announcing an immediate successor today, rest assured, this is not the end of Camaro’s story,” said Scott Bell, vice president, Global Chevrolet.
GM is in the process of shifting to an all-electric lineup of vehicles by 2035, as it invests billions in designing and building future EV models, with 75% of capital spending now dedicated to EVs and autonomous vehicles. That has resulted in a severe scaling back of investment in new versions of traditional internal combustion engined vehicles.
The current model is the sixth version of the Camaro in its history. It is built at the Lansing Grand River Assembly Plant in Michigan, which will stop building it in January, 2024.
The Camaro model was first introduced in 1966 as a competitor to Ford’s hugely successful Mustang, which had come out in 1964. After five generations of redesigned models, the Camaro was dropped from the lineup in 2002, but brought back in 2010.
In recent years, though, its sales have not matched those of the more popular Challenger or the Mustang. In 2022 GM reported US Camaro sales of nearly 25,000, slightly more than half of the nearly 48,000 Mustangs sold by Ford and less than half of the 55,000 Challengers sold by Dodge.
Ford unveiled a new generation of Mustang at the Detroit Auto Show last September. The new Mustang, which will go on sale next summer, will be purely gasoline powered, not electric or hybrid. This will mark the seventh generation and the 58th continuous year of production for the Mustang.
These muscle cars or pony cars are also among the last car models – as opposed to SUVs or trucks – manufactured by the three automakers.
