1st Drive: 2016 Chevrolet Camaro.
The two Detroit giants have been waging the pony car wars since the 1960s, and the battle remains just as fierce today. If it wins when it comes to performance, fuel economy, ergonomics, styling and interior comfort, this all-new Camaro could earn Chevrolet new customers and help establish it as a go-to brand. “There’s a renewed interest in performance,” Autotrader senior analyst Michelle Krebs said. “Sales of passenger cars have been falling as SUV rise, but good old Detroit muscle cars have bucked that trend. General Motors Co’s (GM) bread-and-butter Chevrolet brand took the wraps off its new Camaro, revealing a performance version that tops the Ford Mustang’s by 20 horsepower. That was the mantra Chevrolet’s engineers repeated as they developed the 2016 Camaro, and the V6 version delivered on all counts in quick laps on the track of the Detroit Grand Prix Sunday. They’re benefiting from an influx of new vehicles and technology.” “The last Camaro deserves a lot of credit,” said Eric Noble, president of the Carlab, a product development consultant in Orange, California. “It went toe to toe with the Mustang and put Chevrolet in a strong position.
The sixth-generation Chevrolet Camaro, unveiled Saturday, is faster and more agile than its predecessor, General Motors executives and personnel said. “It’s slightly smaller, it’s 200 pounds lighter, and its’ got more horsepower,” Chevrolet spokesman Monte Doran said after the car was revealed. “So it feels more alive and more nimble and more athletic. Just this past year you’ve been gifted a 707-horsepower Challenger Hellcat and a brand-new Mustang, with a 500-plus-horsepower Shelby GT350 waiting in the chute. GM said that the high-performance SS version of the sixth-generation Camaro, revealed on Saturday at Belle Isle on the Detroit River, is the most powerful muscle car it has ever built, with a 455 horsepower V-8 engine, compared with 435 for the Mustang GT. You get into a fifth-gen car and you’d never say it feels slow or sluggish but you get out of it and you feel this car and its just such a different driving experience.” To some observers, the latest incarnation of GM’s signature pony car did not take an abrupt design departure from its predecessor, as it has done in years past. The cars are no longer big sellers; today’s rivalry is more about brand image and bragging rights. “They each sell under 100,000 cars a year, and they continually spend a massive amount of money and manpower tweaking handling and increasing horsepower to remain competitive with each other,” Sullivan said.
With regular unleaded gasoline averaging less than US$2.70 a gallon — almost US$1 less than a year earlier — muscle cars seem to be back in vogue. The big question will be whether the 2016 Camaro’s 270-horsepower turbocharged four-cylinder base engine can match the Mustang’s 300-horsepower base V-6. •Fuel economy.
It is the first one to have a turbocharger, and the first to have a four-cylinder engine since the “Iron Duke” engine built by Pontiac, and found in the 1982-84 Camaro models, as well as more than a dozen other GM vehicles. Chevy, which first introduced the Camaro for the 1967 model year, is going after sports car enthusiasts with big, powerful engines and some better technology to improve the car’s handling. “This car is part of the true foundations of the Chevy brand,” GM president Dan Ammann said in an interview at the event. “It brings new people into the brand.” In an attempt to leapfrog Ford, Chevy is also offering a 335 horsepower V-6 engine and a 275 horsepower, turbo four-cylinder motor.
The addition of cylinder deactivation to GM’s stalwart 3.6-liter V-6 engine should boost highway fuel economy substantially, creating a yawning gap between it and Ford’s V-6 base model. That engine will also make it the most fuel-efficient Camaro ever, achieving north of 30 miles per gallon, GM executive vice president Mark Reuss said Saturday. It’ll rely on some Cadillac influence to do it–along with a slightly smaller footprint and a lot more technology underhood, including its four-cylinder ever. The Ford’s sales were 82,635 last year, according to Autodata Corp. “You have the choice of four-, six- and eight-cylinder engines,” Sullivan said. “Some versions are coupes and others are convertibles, and they all are offered with a variety of transmissions.” But the Camaro and its Mustang rival hold a special place in American car culture, said Leslie Kendall, curator of the Petersen Automotive Museum.
There are three engine options in all, the second will come with a 3.6L V-6 engine with direct fuel injection and active fuel management — also a first on the Camaro. GM says the new Camaro is quicker, a better handler, lighter, and more broadly talented than the gen-five car that bows out this year after bowing in 2010.
Chevy’s not talking about the new Camaro’s weight distribution yet, but the coupe felt very well balanced as it hugged tight turns and set up for fast straightaways on the road course on Belle Isle. That V-6 will get an estimated 335 horsepower and 284 lb-ft of torque. “The styling has evolved, yet the vehicle still clearly screams ‘Camaro’ even at a quick glance,” said Akshay Anand, an analyst for Kelley Blue book. “The all-new Camaro should also be faster with technological enhancements and a lighter body. The Camaro is quite a different beast from either Caddy, though, with more than 70 percent new content wrapped around the best of those related vehicles. This time, the base model Camaro four-cylinder will pack pack 275 horsepower, with a turbocharger that helps rocket the Camaro to 100 kmh in less than six seconds. The goal, says Aaron Link, the Camaro’s lead development engineer, was to shift to the slightly smaller Alpha footprint while building on the best attributes of the previous Zeta-based Camaro, its wide track and low center of gravity.
By the numbers, the 2016 Chevrolet Camaro checks in at 188.3 inches overall, down 2.3 inches from Gen 5; at 74.7 inches wide, down 0.8 inches; at 53.1 inches, down 1.1 inches; and at 110.7 inches, down 1.6 inches. Ford reintroduced one to its Mustang lineup with the current generation model in 2014, and four-cylinder turbo motors also power sport sedans such as the BMW 3 Series and Mercedes-Benz C-Class.
The new car is 2.3 inches shorter, 0.8 inches narrower and 1.2 inches less tall than the 2015 model, but its profile is nearly identical to the outgoing car. •Interior comfort. With that and more widespread use of high-strength steel, the Camaro drops a minimum of 200 pounds in comparable trim levels, Link says, to about 3,000 pounds in base trim. That gives the Camaro team at General Motors the confidence that its new 2.0 litre engine – a modified version of what goes into a small Cadillac sports sedan – will be popular. Nobody ever bought a Camaro for its rear legroom, but the car must be comfortable for two people and capable of carrying four without too much whining.
The steering gear comes from the upcoming V-Series CTS, albeit with longer tie rods that give the Camaro a wider track and helped draw out the proportions into something less sedan-like–and more a long-nose, classically proportioned coupe. The only two parts that will carry over from the fifth-generation model are the iconic Chevrolet bow-tie emblem on the tail lamp panel and the SS badge.
The new styling features traditional Camaro design language, including the grille and headlight aperture that stretches across the entire width of the car. But what you really want to know is what’s going to launch the Camaro into new performance arenas–everything from a new four-cylinder version to an SS with Corvette power.
Link says it just won’t fit: “It’s not a cost or image thing, or sharing with Corvette, it just wouldn’t fit in our tunnel.” You can give up any green dreams for the Camaro too–there won’t be a plug-in hybrid system of any kind, for the same space reasons. “There’s no room for battery pack and plug-in…it’s packaged pretty darn tightly.” A 3.6-liter V-6 sits in the middle of the lineup. GM says this application of the LT1 has its own exhaust manifolds and other adapted hardware, but still shares about 80 percent of its components with the Corvette installation. A sensor under the shift rail detects movement and blips the throttle for a smoother, cleaner gear changes–and the function can be disabled via steering-wheel paddles. It tunes throttle, steering, stability control, and shift patterns through Snow/Ice, Tour, Sport and – on SS models – Track settings, and lets drivers break free from the presets to choose a custom combination of settings.
Both the V-6 and V-8 amplify engine noises and pump them into the cabin–and can be fitted with a two-mode exhaust that skips the mufflers under heavy throttle to boost the musclecar sounds depending on the driver’s mood. The four-cylinder also has a different exhaust setup–it went “from a one-in, two-out exhaust, to a two-in, two-out, so the exhaust pipe coming out of engine splits before exhaust.” “Our engine actually has some pretty good character of its own,” he says. “We’ve erred on the subtle side for sure. Cockpit styling and packaging has been the single biggest deficit of the 2010-2015 car, what with its lifeless cabin, a useless back seat, and front buckets that couldn’t accommodate taller drivers, even without a helmet. They still take a back seat, but with some work, Link’s crew has found a little more space in the rear. “When we first started, we realized headroom in rear was pretty bad, so we shrink-wrapped headliner better to the rear and moved some things around to be able to gain a full inch of headroom that we didn’t have.” In front, better clearance should be a boon to anyone strapping in for lap times.
The CD player’s been axed, too, to make more room for a big 8.0-inch touchscreen atop the stack–paired with another one offered that slots between the gauges.