Car Review: 2010 Chevrolet Camaro

Visibility through the windshield is good despite the long hood and raked windshield, thanks to careful location of the driver’s seat. Rear visibility over the driver’s shoulder isn’t very good, but then it’s impossible to make it good with a roofline this sporty. Ferraris don’t have good rearward vision, either.

Driving Impressions

Like the Pontiac G8, the Camaro’s chassis was developed in Australia, and the Ozzies again aced it. The structure is rigid, helping make the turn-in precise for a car this size; the grip is secure, and the damping is solid and supple, with both the V6 (FE2 suspension) and firmer V8 (FE3). The front suspension uses struts, and the rear is an independent multi-link that’s rubber isolated. And we never encountered a harsh moment with the ride, in either car.

We spent half a day driving in the country east of San Diego, with the chief designer, Canadian Gene Stafanyshyn, riding shotgun and giving us the whole backstory. He’s the guy you can thank for the true programming of the TAPshift manual automatic transmission. It does what you tell it to do, nothing more. We love that. Bully for GM, no corporate committee decisions, here. Stafanyshyn said he too hates manual automatic transmissions that shift on their own. One especially nice thing about this is that when you’re in sixth gear on the freeway and accelerate, it won’t kick down. It uses its sufficient 273 pound-feet of torque, as it should.

One small (but good) speeding problem with the LT is that the cabin is quiet, thanks partly to liquid sound deadener, so 80 mph feels like 70. We chose the Camaro LT with its 3.6-liter V6 as our test model, because we think that’s the shining surprise of the line. Sure, the throaty 6.2-liter, 426-horsepower SS will get front center stage, but the sweet-sounding, 7000-rpm V6 that gets 29 highway miles per gallon is the future. Its 304 horsepower is not only more than the 1967 Camaro SS (295 hp from a 350- cubic-inch V8), but more than last year’s Mustang GT with a 4.6-liter dohc V8. The Camaro LT accelerates from 0-60 mph in 5.9 seconds, and will do the quarter mile in 14.4 seconds, which is hot in anyone’s book. Stafanyshyn said the secret is the spark ignition in this one-year-old version of the Cadillac engine.

The LT will also stop from 60 mph in a superb 106 feet, as measured by Motor Trend magazine, or 128 feet according to GM. Surprisingly, the SS with its four-piston Brembo brakes doesn’t do much better, being nearly 200 pounds heavier. Those big brakes will be more fade resistant, handy on a racetrack, but you’d be using the LT’s brakes pretty hard to get them that hot.

Of course, you might be inclined to drive the LT that hard, especially with the six-speed manual transmission; this might be the most usable sporty combination. The gearbox is not exactly like butter, and Chevrolet says the throws are short but that’s relative, and they are shorter than some. But overall it shifted nicely, including easily down into first gear for hairpin turns.

The SS is humongously fast, so if you’re driving it hard, you’re way into the danger zone with the law. It wins the 2010 muscle car battle with the Dodge Challenger SRT8 and Mustang GT, hands-down, say the enthusiast mags. And let’s not forget that price, an absolute steal at $31k (almost matching the 1967 Camaro SS price of $26,800 in today’s dollars). But we were surprised and a bit disappointed by the civility of the exhaust note, as well as the 6000-rpm redline (with the automatic), so low it felt like the engine was being prevented from working. However, it wasn’t; because the horsepower peaks at 5900 rpm, that redline was right. The good news is that the SS with the manual transmission redlines at 6600.

Summary

The new Camaro succeeds on all the main fronts: drop-dead gorgeous looks, potent and efficient engines borrowed from Cadillac and Corvette, great transmissions, superb handling and ride, and great prices. The only area where GM might have missed is the instrumentation, as it lacks the tidiness of the rest of the car.

NewCarTestDrive.com correspondent Sam Moses drove the new Camaro models near San Diego.

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