The COPO dealer that never stopped

Most of the great Camaro dealer-tuner stories end somewhere in the 1970s or '80s. The shop closes, the name goes quiet, and maybe someone revives it decades later as a nostalgia act. Berger Chevrolet in Grand Rapids, Michigan, just kept going. The same family has run it for five generations, through the COPO years, the Berger SS and the modern COPO race cars.

A family dealership

The business traces to 1925, when William H. Berger II became branch manager of a Chevrolet dealer's east-side store at 1034 Wealthy Street, in a former blacksmith's shop. In August 1926 he opened it as the W.H. Berger Motor Company, and in 1933 he moved to Lake Drive. His son Dale joined that same year at 18 and took over management in 1944. Dale Jr. started in the business at 15 and, after college in 1958, went to work as a parts counterman. In January 1966 the dealership opened a new facility on 5.2 acres on 28th Street, just in time for the Camaro.

The parts counter that went national

It was Dale Berger Jr. who built the performance side. In the late 1960s he set up a High-Performance Parts Department that sold over the counter and by mail, and it grew quickly. By the dealership's own history, it was receiving about 50 pieces of mail a day for catalogs and parts orders by 1967, shipping across the country and overseas. The operation appeared in the enthusiast magazines, and GM itself made a training film based on how Berger ran it.

The COPO cars

The route itself was unglamorous. COPO, the Central Office Production Order, existed so fleet buyers could order equipment that was not on the regular option list, from taxi seats to heavy-duty truck parts. A dealer who knew how to use it could order a Camaro with an engine Chevrolet's own policy kept off the order form, and have it built on the assembly line with a factory warranty. COPO 9561 cost $489.75. It brought the L72, an iron-block 427 with a Holley four-barrel on an aluminum intake, rectangular-port heads, a forged crankshaft and 11:1 compression, rated at 425 hp and 460 lb-ft, along with heavy-duty cooling, front disc brakes and a 4.10 axle.

Silver 2002 Camaro SS coupe — 2002 Camaro SS Photo: MercurySable99, CC BY-SA 4.0, via Wikimedia Commons Original photograph License

When the COPO route opened for 1969, Berger was one of the handful of dealers ready to use it. Dale Berger ordered about 50 of these COPO 9561 Camaros, second only to Yenko, and the dealership is said to have sold about 40 of them, delivered in two batches with February and May build dates. Many were “double COPO” cars, pairing the 427 order with COPO 9737, the Sports Car Conversion, which added extra gauges, a thicker front stabilizer bar and Rally wheels. One surviving car shows what they cost: its original owner negotiated about $300 off a sticker of $3,980.10 and paid $3,685.56.

From the outside a Berger COPO car looks like any big-block SS, and the cowl tag, engine stamping and dealer paperwork are what identify one today. Magazine testers took one to York US 30 Dragway with nothing more than headers and a reworked distributor. The dealership sold COPO Corvettes, Novas and Chevelles too, and those cars remain some of the most sought-after Berger-sold vehicles.

Orange 2018 COPO Camaro drag car — 2018 COPO Camaro factory drag car Photo: Michael Rivera, CC BY-SA 4.0, via Wikimedia Commons Original photograph License

The Berger SS

Unlike Yenko or Nickey, Berger's performance story didn't stop when the muscle-car era did. In 2000–2002, Berger partnered with GMMG Inc., a specialty assembler in Marietta, Georgia, to build the Berger SS Camaro: fourth-generation Camaro SS cars ordered through the dealership and upgraded by GMMG. The first run, in 2000, was 31 cars including prototypes, and the dealership counts about 100 Berger SS Camaros across the three years, sold coast to coast. The cars were a dealer's idea, as the 1969 COPO cars had been, but this time the upgrades were done by a specialist builder rather than on a factory line. GMMG-built Berger cars are documented, collectible, and have their own registry community today.

COPO again

When Chevrolet revived the COPO name in 2012 for a factory-built, race-only drag car, Berger went back to it. The dealership says it has sold more than 20 of the modern COPO Camaros, and in 2016 one of them carried Jeff Strickland to the NHRA Stock Eliminator national championship, which Berger describes as the first NHRA championship for a COPO Camaro.

A hundred years

Dale Berger Jr., who started the performance-parts operation, died on May 26, 2018, at 79. A fifth generation had already joined the business in 2009. The dealership marked its hundredth year in 2025. That means Berger Chevrolet has been in continuous operation longer than the Camaro nameplate has existed, and has outlasted every other major COPO-era dealer-tuner. The factory side of the COPO story is in the rare and significant cars, and its best-known dealer in the dealer who out-engineered Chevrolet.

Did you know

Berger's Camaro tribute to Dick Harrell, "Mr. Chevrolet," came in 2004: 30 numbered wide-body Z28s plus prototypes, rated at 630 hp from a 427 based on the C5-R race engine. Harrell's widow, daughter and old shop crew signed the strut-tower braces at a launch event at GMMG in Marietta, Georgia, on May 27, 2004.
Berger's annual All GM Show ended with its 26th edition on Saturday, Aug. 23, 2025, capping the dealership's centennial year. Founder Bill Berger's store sold about 125 cars a year at around $700 each in its early years; family lore says he sometimes skipped his own paycheck to pay employees.
By the end of the 1960s Berger sold more than 1,700 new vehicles a year, more than triple its earlier volume. NADA also notes that when Matt Berger became general manager at 22 in 1981, his first changes included TV commercials featuring a talking horse. NADA's 2025 profile says it ranks fourth in the nation for GM parts sales.
GMMG began with the Berger SS. The Marietta, Georgia shop, founded in 1998 by Camaro enthusiast Matt Murphy, was first asked to build a special Camaro for Berger's 75th anniversary in 2000. Its red-white-and-blue crest was inspired by Don Yenko's emblems, and what the letters stand for was never officially explained.

Sources for these details

Sources and method