The Chevrolet Camaro, for decades the dream car of many teenage American males, is going out of production.
General Motors, which sells the brawny muscle car, said Wednesday it will stop making the current generation early next year.
The future of the car, which is raced on NASCAR and other circuits, is a bit murky.
GM says another generation may be in the works.
“While we are not announcing an immediate successor today, rest assured, this is not the end of Camaro’s story,” Scott Bell, vice president of Chevrolet, said in a statement Wednesday.
The current sixth-generation Camaro, introduced in 2016, has done well on the racetrack, but sales have been tailing off in recent years.
When the current generation Camaro came out in 2016, Chevrolet sold 72,705 of them.
But by the end of 2021 that number fell almost 70% to 21,893.
It rebounded a bit last year to 24,652.
GM said last of the 2024 model year of the cars will come off the assembly line in Lansing, Mich., in January.
Spokesman Trevor Thompkins said he can’t say anything more about a future Camaro.
“We’re not saying anything specific right now,” he said.
The company, he said, has an understanding with auto-racing sanctioning bodies that the sixth-generation car can continue racing.
GM will have parts available and the Camaro body will stay on the race track, he said.
NASCAR said that because the Generation 6 Camaro was in production when GM originally got permission to race, it remains qualified to race in NASCAR Cup and NASCAR Xfinity Series races.
GM will offer a collector’s edition package of the 2024 Camaro RS and SS in North America, and a limited number of high-performance ZL-1 Camaros.
The collector’s edition cars will have ties to the first-generation Camaro from the 1960s and its GM code name “Panther,” the company said without giving specifics.
[Written in collaboration with other media outlets with information from the following sources]
