I was on business travel several weeks ago, as I had referenced in my earlier Ford Granada post. I consider myself something of a “practiced extrovert”, and most of the time I just want to be in my own space and other environments of my choosing. Part of the key to embracing travel for work has been to make each trip my own – to decompress, explore and find ways to re-center myself once I’ve finished work for the day. It was during one such foot trek in beautiful downtown Des Moines, Iowa that I found myself in the eclectic East Village neighborhood, with arty clothing and furniture shops, ethnic restaurants, and bars and bistros from gritty to upscale.
As I was walking down Walnut, one of DM’s major thoroughfares, I almost didn’t notice this beautiful, black beast street-parked in front of Zombie Burger. But when I did, it was like recognizing another Flint expatriate – one who had hit the big time, like one of the guys from Grand Funk Railroad or Ready For The World. The 1970 Chevy A-bodies were the last, production Chevrolet automobiles that rolled off an assembly line in my hometown, with the very last one being an example of the exciting, new-for-’70 Monte Carlo personal luxury coupe.
I have spoken with guys a few years older than me who also grew up in Flint, some of whom had worked in the factories (or the “shops”, as we call them). One of my buds recalled the thrill of hearing the tires squeal on a ’69 Chevelle during the braking test at the end of the production line. To witness the “birth” of an early split-wheelbase Chevelle would have given me goosebumps. I have toured that same factory in 2011 and just this past summer (2015), though production now consists of Chevy Silverado and GMC Sierra pickup trucks. A tour of the GM Flint Truck Assembly Plant is fun, fascinating and completely free. I imagine quite a few ’70 “Code F” (for “Flint”) Chevelles rolled off the assembly line at Van Slyke & West 12th.
There were 8,773 total SS 454’s produced for 1970, which consisted of 4,298 “base” LS5’s which made 360 horsepower, plus an additional 4,475 LS6 models (with their performance enhancements) making 450 hp – the latter very nearly making the “golden” 1:1 ratio of cubic inches to horsepower. Both engines made 500 lb.-ft. of torque. With the LS6 and standard Muncie 4-speed manual, 0-60 came in a blistering 6.1 seconds – a figure that would remain crazy-impressive until only relatively recently in the automotive landscape, with new, workaday V6 Toyota Camrys now capable of the same. Whether this SS 454 was genuine or a tribute (or had either engine) really doesn’t matter to me. Just the idea that such a car ever existed was enough for me in the moment.
A man I presumed to be the owner and his companion materialized as I was photographing the car. My car-geekness and genuine enthusiasm has probably gotten me out of a few potential jams, with owners warming up to my adoration of their vehicles after witnessing me (sometimes obliviously) taking photos. He let me get a few more shots before they got into the car and fired it up. The 454 big-block V8 played a sweet melody out of those duals, as the car and its occupants zoomed back into the central core of downtown in the Des Moines dusk. My night was then complete, no matter what could follow.
As photographed by the author in the East Village district of Des Moines, Iowa.
Monday, October 26, 2015.
Now I miss my 71 SS Chevelle even more. It too was a big block but only a 403 (396 really). Triple black with factory air, it was a great car. I wish they kept the quad headlights for 71. Those square tail lights don’t carry over too well from 69, roundie’s look better.
Right there, the high point of GM as an automotive power. Coming upon a car such as this could only bring a smile to your face. 45 years on and counting, still as fresh as the day this and the other GM intermediates graced the show room floors. Wonderful catch!
Sweet. I will always swoon for the ’70 Chevelle. One of my favorite cars of all time, maybe even second to the 67/68 Impala hardtop coupe.
BTW, I have backed into a similar routine on business trips: play the extrovert while you need to, but then disappear and do your own thing for a while.
DItto about business trips. I generally like those I work with, but seeing them all day and then all evening in hospitality rooms for more functions prompts a need to disappear.
Right, guys! I am glad I am not the only one.
Make that 3 of us!
YESSSSSSSSSSSSS!
I want one of these soooooo bad, but with retirement around the corner, I must save what resources I have.
If I could, however, make mine a two-door hardtop, 250 Powerglide. I want the style, not the speed.
I understand, Zackman, because I’m in the same place you are, with retirement closing in like a runaway locomotive. A stylish 2 door hardtop with the 250/Powerglide combo would suit me down to my shoes. Like someone once said, “It’s not what you do, it’s how you look while you’re doing it”.
Ah, the glory that was once
RomeDetroit!Nice find! The popular muscle cars bore the snot out of me at car shows, but finding one out on the street all by itself is something else altogether. It is always a thrill to hear it start and watch it ease off down the street.
+1
This Chevelle would be invisible to me in a carshow setting, but spotting one in the wild could be the highlight of my day.
Heartily agreed. I’d much rather find an original sedan or a kool kustom at shows, but finding a car like this on the street is truly special.
In the 60s and 70s it was Ford/Mercury (and occasionally) Plymouth….or nothing. Then I got a chance to drive a shipmate’s 69 SS 396, and suddenly I realized Ford had a serious competitor in Chevy. And the 70 takes a very good car a lot further.
Sorry, but I prefer the 70 over the 71 and 72. And it would have to be V8, though I’m not picky about which one or which transmission.
A friend of mine has spent the past 6-7 years building a “faux” SS 454 Chevelle. He has the drivetrain installed and the car is now a runner; the final stage is to finish the interior and then paint the car. The Chevelle SS 454 was the car Greg lusted over in high school, and of course couldn’t afford then. The price on factory SS 454’s has gone through the roof but it isn’t particularly difficult to clone them. He built his to drive and doesn’t try to pass the car off as an authentic SS 454. If I can find a picture of the car I will try and post it.
That’s a good summary of why low-spec survivors are getting snapped up and turned into “clones” or “tributes”.
If it’s taking this long, I presume Greg isn’t just opening up his wallet but actually turning his own wrenches (as well as opening his wallet!).
Who can’t help but think of Matthew McCaughnahay’s character in Dazed And Confused when they see a black ’70 Chevelle SS 454, this is one of my all time favorite muscle cars
“Alright Alright Alright”
“I keep getting older, the girls stay the same age.”
I feel dirty now.
Your second shot is amazing. The Chevelle, the outskirts of downtown, the red brilliance of the signal light, and the state capital building glowing in the background. Truly terrific, as is all of your photography.
A former co-worker had a ’70 Chevelle 454 SS that he was very proud of. It was a dark green and in great shape, driven by him regularly and carefully. One day he was offered an obscene amount of money for it. When he told me how much, he continued by saying it helped salve his missing the car – especially since he was able to buy one from a friend in near comparable condition for a whole lot less.
The SS396 Chevelle, then later SS454, always seemed like the musclecar for the serious driver who wasn’t nearly as taken in by the marketing and hype of cars like the GTO and Road Runner. Even the base 325hp SS396 ran pretty well. IIRC, the best year for overall musclecar sales was 1969, with the Road Runner selling the most (one out of four B-body Plymouths was a Road Runner that year), then the SS396, and the GTO actually dropping down to third place.
The biggest issue with the SS396 (and all intermediate GM musclecars) was the coil-spring rear suspension which was at a disadvantage to the competition’s leaf springs, particular Chrysler, whose engineers were smart enough to actually add a leaf to one side to compensate for torque wind-up. Ford’s solution, staggered rear shocks, wasn’t as good, but it helped. Adding traction bars was the usual solution for the GM cars, but those look like hell. A more aesthetically pleasing option was an axle carrier pinion snubber, which effectively limited how much the axle moved under severe load.
Regardless, many consider the 375hp SS396 and LS6 SS454 as the true zenith of the musclecar era. All things considered, it’s hard to argue with that sentiment.
Boxed trailing arms were factory equipment and seem to help…
Gimmicks aside, part of the Roadrunner sold so well was because it was marketed as a budget-priced muscle car. The GTO was probably more comparable to the Plymouth GTX. Sales of GTX also suffered when the Roadrunner was introduced.
I remember reading that the most expensive part about tooling-up the Roadrunner package was the unique rad support, because the “Meep meep” horn had a different bracket than the standard horn. Other than the decals, everything else to build the car was already in the parts bins.
I don’t often hear good things about Chrysler sticking with “buggy springs” in the back, but they were a practical solution to getting the power to the pavement. The Chrysler differentials also had a pinion snubber as standard fare, with an adjustable replacement available from the Mopar parts counter.
How the Road Runner / GTX / Duster / E-body story played out at Chrysler is always a fascinating musclecar story. In 1966, high-octane, leaded gas was cheap and plentiful, insurance rates were still low, bumpers were still maxed out at 2.5 mph, and serious emission standards were still years away. No less than four of the five GM divisions had an intermediate musclecar and the burgeoning market showed no signs of slowing down anytime soon.
So, Chrysler (correctly) decided to widen their musclecar offerings for 1968 to compete with all those GM cars, with the Road Runner being little more than a pillared, stripped-down GTX with a smaller (but still potent) engine and much lower price. It was a homerun.
Then, something odd happened. Chrysler quickly noticed that, almost immediately, a lot of people were optioning up their Road Runners (a hardtop was offered mid-1968) until they were nearly as equipped as the GTX. Soon, the only real difference between a loaded Road Runner and a GTX was the 440-4v, GTX-only engine. Yeah, GTX sales suffered, but the profit level for either car would still be about the same.
Dodge was even more interesting. At first, they didn’t want a cheap, Road Runner-type vehicle eating into Coronet R/T and Charger sales. But there was even less new tooling needed to come up with the Super Bee (no special radiator support needed for a special horn) and when the Road Runner took off, Dodge had little choice but to jump in, too. Plus, Dodge had never really had a direct competitor to the base, 389-engine GTO (the Coronet R/T, like the GTX, always came standard with the 440-4v). Now, they did. Times were good.
So, it’s easy to see where Chrysler didn’t see the 1970 E-body / Duster debacle coming. Hell, they were in two completely different classes. Surely, no one interested in a swoopy E-body ponycar would be cross-shopping with a Valiant-clone. Past experience had shown that a Valiant-based coupe, no matter how sporty, just wasn’t much of a seller. And you could only option up a Valiant so much. Boy, were they wrong.
Besides the radiator support and horn, Plymouth was paying an annual $50,000 fee to Warner Bros for it, the SuperBee was an in house “character” for Dodge.
And $50k was a bargain, considering it amounted to a little over $1/per car for the first year, alone (44k sold).
The true zenith of the muscle car era is not anything that came from the factory. I have narrowed it down to a few:
1. 1970-1976 Plymouth Duster with a Hemi engine
2. 1970-1977 Chevy Vega with a 454(or larger) engine
3. 1975-1980 Chevy Monza with a 383 chevy small block
4. 1970-1977 Ford Maverick with a huge engine of some kind
I would say a 75/76 Chevy Monza Town Coupe with a hotrodded 383 SBC would probably be my number one pick because it does not require any body or frame modifications. Second would probably be a 74ish Duster with a hotrodded small block MOPAR engine of some kind.
That reminds me of an article on Hemmings blog about an owner of a 1974 Buick Apollo GSX where it was only strips and decals and the owner remade it the way he should had left the factory. http://blog.hemmings.com/index.php/2012/09/13/tired-of-being-ignored-improving-the-last-gsx/
Time to imagine a Nova SS-454, Olds Omega 442 and a Ventura/Phoenix GTO. 😉
Nothing wrong about building what you want. I did that, with my ’83 Ford Ranger 4X4. Long bed, dual fuel tanks. Currie built ‘9 rear end with disc brakes. And oh, mildly built 302 and C4. No, not stock. And yes a very usable truck. Much like a pickup version of a 66-77 Bronco
For me, I think 1970 was the peak model year for GM, and no car exemplified that better than the Chevelle SS454. I felt that way then and still do now. This car is stunning. Last Saturday night there was a red one with black vinyl top valet parked right in front of Bridges (the restaurant seen in the film Mrs Doubtfire), with good reason. I think I’d be happy with just about any ’70 Chevelle, but I’d want at least a 307/THM powertrain.
A friend of mine had a ’70 SS454, one of the base engine ones. Red with a black vinyl top. He loved it, and stupidly sold it when he got married. He would see one occasionally and start looking online, but the money and the right car never came at the same time. He and his wife sold their huge farm a few years ago (He was no farmer, the original owner’s son leased the land from him to plant, and finally bought it back) for a huge chunk of cash, and finally, he found his Chevelle SS, a really nice 396 that was all original, except the motor had aftermarket heads, a cam, intake, etc, and was vastly more powerful than stock. The original parts were in the trunk, ready to install, if he wanted to. He didn’t, and hasn’t. The car has been great, and just went into the garage for the winter. His daily driver is a 2012 Challenger Yellow Jacket. He bought another toy recently, a ’71 Challenger R/T clone. It’s got a built 440 in it, and it’s a lot of fun too. I wish I had the cash for a summer toy.
It’s funny, these Chevelles were so common (whether SS or not, though not so many 454’s) in their day and they did seem to take a back seat to more heavily “branded” cars like the GTO or RoadRunner, or even CobraJet Torino. But they sure have aged well! Nice story, great photos.
Chevrolet was the lowest rung on the GM Sloan ladder, with Pontiac mostly assuming a slightly higher performance car division position, thanks, at first, to Bunkie Knudson’s ‘Wide Track’ cars, then Delorean’s GTO. Everyone knows the story how GM corporate initially hated the GTO (and was going to fire Delorean) but the car became a hit.
So, GM was very careful not to market the SS396 ‘too’ well and cannibalize those Goat sales. Besides, it’s unlikely Chevrolet’s marketing department had anyone like Pontiac’s Jim Wangers who was tight with Delorean and had his finger on the sixties’ musclecar scene. Wanger even went street-racing, although he was always a passenger and never a driver.
There are a couple of famous Pontiac ads and commercials that were only printed once before GM pulled them as being too wild. The print ad had a shot of a couple guys in ’68 Goat obviously waiting at a Detroit Woodward Ave crossover median for a race, with the lone caption, “You know the rest of the story”. The commercial that only ran once was ‘The Humbler’ for the 1970 Super Bowl that showed a GTO slowly rumbling through a drive-in at night, again, quite obviously looking for a race. That quickly got yanked, too.
Then there was Chrysler with their wild, psychedelic cartoon car ads for the Road Runner (and the rest of their musclecars). None of that was really Chevrolet’s conservative style for the period.
Still, in the vein of the hit car song Little GTO by Ronnie and the Daytonas, it’s worth noting that there was a little known SS396 song released by Paul Revere and the Raiders in 1967. It was similar to, but not nearly as good as, Little GTO, and was just released as a promotion for Chevrolet dealers. But they did at least try (albeit half-heartedly) to compete with the Pontiac and Plymouth marketing campaigns.
Great car, great photo’s. Grand and Funky song reference.
I love these cars. Years ago I had one; 1970 SS396 4 speed, Cranberry with Black stripes and top. Foolishly sold it in the early eighties for $800, I think it was. Anyway… can someone explain to me the attraction of having fuzzy dice in a car of this era? I get it in a tri-five, but it just seems out of synch to me in seventies muscle.
Definitely great-looking cars; Chevy got it just right on these. Not overdecorated, not underdecorated, not a line out of place. And the SS versions had the performance bit down as well.
A guy I went to high school with drove a red ’70 SS with black racing stripes. Considering this was 1998, it was easily the most eye-catching and most admired car in the student lot. It had a later 350 in the engine bay but he claimed that the car was an original 454SS and that they had the non-running original 454 stored in the garage for an eventual numbers-matching resto. It could have been (and probably was) a lot of hot air, but either way, that was one heck of a ride for a 17 year old.
Sweet cars. Any of the 4-eyed front clips look great to me on these and the related El Caminos. These were still attainable back in the early 90s so a few guys my age had them back in the day. Mostly 350s, but a 454 here and there.
Looks like “Melba Toast” from Dazed and Confused. http://www.imcdb.org/vehicle_26103-Chevrolet-Chevelle-1970.html
It wasn’t a muscle car, but there is one 1970 Chevelle that I will always remember. It was a pale yellow Malibu two-door hardtop, a base V8 with an automatic…a rental car.
I got my first traffic citation in it. Rolled a right turn on a red signal, right in front of one of LAPD’s finest.
Nice looking car, though, and as often seemed to be the case, the stylists got it right the first time. Later years got what I considered “changes for the sake of change.”
Some very nice dusk/evening photos that suit the car well. What is meant by split wheel base? It can’t be like the Renault (?) which actually had a slightly different wheelbase left to right…
Thanks, Mike. Starting with the second-generation ’68s, wheelbases differed depending on bodystyle, unlike the first-gen cars (which all rode a 115″ wheelbase). Coupes and convertibles rode a 112″ wheelbase, while sedans and wagons were on a 116″ wheelbase. These were carried over for the 3rd-gen ’73s. And now I need to know more about that Renault!
The Renault in question used a trailing arm and torsion bar rear suspension with the torsion bars going transversely from one side of the car to the other. They staggered the wheelbase so one torsion bar would be slightly ahead of the other one.
Thanks, BOC! Can you recall the model name? I suppose I can Google that myself with your helpful info.
https://www.curbsideclassic.com/curbside-classics-european/car-show-classic-1973-renault-16-and-asymmetric-suspension-configuration/
MCT, thanks for linking that great article. I would never have known that car was that technologically advanced just from looking at it.
The 1970 was a rigorous refresh of the 1968-69 and so, if the stylists “got it right the first time” you’d be referring to a ’68, not a facelifted car in the third year of its design cycle.
Also, Road Runner rad supports were not redesigned to accept the “Beep Beep” horn’s bracket. That is ludicrous even for Chrysler. The radiator support that was used in all 1968-70 Road Runners had two variations dependent upon radiator size – 22 inch radiator was standard or a heavy duty 26 inch width radiator was installed in air conditioned cars or cars with a max-cooling package or performance axle package.
Referring to the subject of radiator supports, I should probably edit my statement to include 1968-70 B-bodies as an entirety, not just Road Runners. In any event, to make this post worthwhile I’ve attached a picture of a picture of my ’69 convertible. Please excuse the non-PC license plate. I was 21 when that pic was taken.
What a sweet car. (‘Bet you wish you had it now!) I have such an appreciation for these Mopar B-Bodies today that I never had before.
Thanks! I still have it! It’s just tucked away in the garage, making it difficult to get a good “new” picture. You can see its tail in the pic below, probably the most recent. It is a bench seat four-speed car.