The designers who disowned it

The Camaro was designed under project XP-836 in Chevrolet Studio 2 at the GM Technical Center in Warren, Michigan, before it had a name; internally it was just the F Car. Nearly sixty years later it is one of the most admired shapes in American car design, which is not how two of the men who signed it off remembered it.

A car nobody wanted to build

The F Car started life as something GM had already said no to. Bunkie Knudsen, Chevrolet's general manager into the mid-1960s, was shown an early sporty-car clay based on the Chevy II and reportedly told the team that the one thing they did not need was another car. GM was cautious about adding models the market might not absorb.

The Mustang changed that in April 1964. Ford had found a huge market GM had no answer for, and Ed Cole, GM's car-and-truck boss, pushed a competitor into production on an aggressive timeline. The Camaro reached showrooms in September 1966, and everything about its design was shaped by that deadline.

It also had to share. When Pontiac's John DeLorean lobbied for a two-seat sports car of his own, Cole turned him down and offered him a version of the Chevrolet F-body instead. The same basic car now had to become a Firebird too, with its own styling on the same bones. Decisions in Studio 2 were no longer only Chevrolet's.

The studio

Bill Mitchell, who had succeeded Harley Earl as GM's design chief in 1958, oversaw the work. Mitchell was the man behind the 1963 Corvette Sting Ray and the Mako Shark show cars, and he had very firm views about what a sporting car should look like. The chief designer was Henry Haga, reporting to Dave Holls, a stylist who led the Cadillac, Buick, Pontiac and Chevrolet studios at different points in a forty-year GM career. Chuck Jordan and Irv Rybicki are credited with contributions.

Interior design is credited to Suzanne Vanderbilt and Cathy Kascur of the Chevrolet studio. That deserves a moment: in the mid-1960s very few women held visible automotive design credits anywhere at GM, and two of them shaped the inside of the car you sat in.

It is a long list of names for one car, and that is part of the point. The Camaro was not the work of a single designer with a sketchbook. It was drawn by a studio, reviewed up a chain of command, and reconciled with a sister division, on a schedule set by a competitor.

The verdict

Years later, in retrospective interviews, Mitchell and Rybicki, by then both GM Styling vice presidents, were dismissive about the production car. They described it as a compromised committee effort. Mitchell is reported to have said he couldn't remember what the hell they looked like.

Take that for what it is: two senior designers editorializing about a car they had signed off on, decades after the fact, in an industry where authorship is fought over. It is not a verdict on the design. The first Camaro sold 220,906 copies in its first year, and nearly every other account treats it as a classic. The market has never once agreed with Mitchell.

The other verdict

In February 2015, as the fifth-generation Camaro reached its final year, Chevrolet asked five of its own designers to look back over the car's history. Ed Welburn, GM's vice president of global design and the owner of a 1969 Camaro, took the first generation.

His assessment started almost exactly where Mitchell's ended. The Camaro, he said, "should not have been a design success." It was built on an existing architecture and hurried to market. And yet he called its proportions pure and classic, lean and muscular, with only minor embellishments on the performance models, in contrast to its brasher rivals.

For Welburn the 1969 car was the definitive one: the speed lines trailing the wheel openings, the pulled-out rear fenders, the simulated grilles ahead of the rear wheels, and wide taillights with body-color metal between them to exaggerate the car's width. He said it did not borrow from any other design.

Chevrolet's own designers drew the contrast with the next generation too. Ken Parkinson, reviewing the 1970 car in the same release, pointed out that it was the first Camaro built on its own dedicated architecture, which gave that design team a freedom the first one never had.

What a committee can do

Both verdicts can be true. The first Camaro was a compromise, built on borrowed engineering and shared with Pontiac. Mitchell and Rybicki knew exactly which ideas had been traded away to get it built, and those losses were what they remembered.

The buyers never saw the losses. They saw what came out the other end of the process, and they bought it by the hundreds of thousands.

These stories usually get told as one great man's vision. The Camaro was a crash program run by a studio full of people, some of whom did not much like what they had made.

More on Henry Haga, Larry Shinoda, the name and the launch and the first generation.

Did you know

• Mitchell named his committee. In his oral history he blamed three executives, GM's Cliff Goad, Fisher Body's Bud Goodman and President Jack Gordon, who he said each told the studio to shorten this or change that. The remark was recorded in August 1984 for the Edsel B. Ford Design History Center; he signed the transcript in 1987.
• The car the studio wanted was the warehouse clay. Rybicki said the decision to build on the Chevy-tooled underbody and cowl meant they "couldn't reach" that car. They had photographed it, but the clay wasn't kept and its armature went to another program. When the first Camaro was finished, he said, they started planning the second generation with no interference.
• Both designers blamed the same proportions. Rybicki said the rushed Camaro on the Chevy X platform never got the cowl heights where they wanted. Mitchell credited the second-generation Firebird's ten-year run to "the right dash to axle, the right cowl height."
• Suzanne Vanderbilt was one of GM's original Damsels of Design, hired after graduating from Pratt in 1955. Cranbrook Archives holds her 1965 interior-door drawing for the Panther, the Camaro's code name. Core77 says she returned from graduate school to find herself demoted.

Sources for these details

• The Reminiscences of William L. Mitchell, Automotive Design Oral History (Benson Ford Research Center; interviews by David R. Crippen, Aug. 1984) Reference
• The Reminiscences of Irvin W. Rybicki, Automotive Design Oral History (Benson Ford Research Center; interview June 27, 1985) Reference
• Rebecca Veit, "Suzanne Vanderbilt, GM 'Damsel' Turned Pioneering Auto Designer," Core77, Apr. 5, 2016 Reference

Sources and method