Dealer-tuners
The COPO dealer that never stopped
Berger Chevrolet ordered fifty COPO 427s in 1969 — and is still building performance Camaros, a hundred years after it opened.
Most of the great Camaro dealer-tuner stories end somewhere in the 1970s or '80s — the shop closes, the name goes quiet, someone revives it decades later as a nostalgia act. Berger Chevrolet, family-owned in Grand Rapids, Michigan since 1925, just kept going. Dale Berger ordered more than fifty of the 1969 COPO 427 cars — second only to Yenko among COPO dealers — and Berger's High-Performance Parts Department was a nationally known mail-order operation by the late 1960s.
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, starting with a run of 31 cars — including prototypes — in 2000. GMMG-built Berger cars are documented, collectible, and have their own dedicated registry community today.
Dale Berger Jr., who started the performance-parts operation, died in 2018. The dealership itself marked its 100th year in 2025 — meaning Berger Chevrolet has now been in continuous operation longer than the Camaro nameplate has existed, and has outlasted every other major COPO-era dealer-tuner shop on this list.