American muscle.Matthew DeBord/BI
- The Chevy Camaro SS is a classic V8-powered American muscle car.
- What it adds to the old-school muscle-car experience is some dandy new automotive technology and connectivity, as well as sportier handling.
- My $52,000 test car came with a wild Hot Wheels extra package, along with a few other options, bringing the price up from $42,000 — an insane bargain for this much power and performance.
The Chevy Camaro has a bad reputation, but it’s good bad. In other words, it lives on the belief that it’s a powerful, unrefined, old-school muscle car, and that the quality is a badge of honor.
But that doesn’t mean the Camaro can’t evolve. And it has. The 2018 Camaro SS2 that I tested earlier this year can handle going around corners as effectively as many European sports cars. But it can also vaporize the asphalt in a straight line. The best of both worlds.
Even better, the Camaro SS is a massive bargain the levels of power and performance it delivers. The unadorned version of the car is $42,000. That’s spectacular. And even with a bunch of extras, my tester tipped the cost scales at just a few grand north of $50,000. Speed doesn’t have to destroy your bank account.
The current generation of the Camaro has been around since 2016, after the car was fully reimagined in 2010. These days, sports cars aren’t as popular as they once were, but muscle cars continue to have their fans. They’ve always adored the combination of all-American-ness and uncomplicated power. Stomp that gas pedal and express your core values.
So does that 2018 Camaro SS live up to that reputation? Read on to find out.
So what’s the verdict?
You can clearly skip the whole five-grand Hot Wheels thing if you’re aren’t a giant kid and simply wallow in the the beefy embrace of Camaro SS’s monumental powertrain. The driving experience is so different from the four-cylinder turbocharged version of the Camaro that what we’re dealing with here is another level of machine.
The benefits of big V8’s are torque-on-command and the ability to wind the motor way out on shifts. The redline is at 6,500, so you can have plenty of fun in manual mode by parking the Camaro SS in third gear and focusing on steering and braking. At $42,000 before all the Hot Wheels hotness, this is an insane value in race-track-worthy cars.
In days of yore, you wouldn’t necessarily have wanted to take a Camaro around corners, but the latest iterations of the vehicle have changed that. One can easily imagine a hard swing into a turn after some braking, followed by some throttle and an oversteering exit, with the chassis and suspension supporting rather than protesting the maneuver.
Not that Camaro SS isn’t pleasurable in straight-line mode. It eats freeways for breakfast — all that torque serves up the classic V8 sense of bottomless power. And all you ever have to do is floor it to hunker down the back wheels and raise the front. Cue wildness! Bring on that backwoods Camaro DNA!
And, to be honest, I enjoyed the Camaro SS when it was in docile, poke-around-town mode. But of course, you don’t ultimately want to poke.
BUT therein lies the Camaro SS’s killer advantage. Compared with its natural rival, the Ford Mustang GT, the Camaro is easier to live with on a day-to-day basis. The electrically assisted steering is family-sedan-like in Tour mode, and while the motor can thump and thunder, it doesn’t endless roar.
So not the most practical car in the world, but perhaps more versatile than the competition.
The Camaro SS carries on a decades-old legacy, but nicely updates it. This, folks, is the muscle car matured.
