What is a Camaro?

Chevrolet announced the name at a press conference at Detroit's Statler-Hilton Hotel on June 28, 1966. It was notable at the time for connecting journalists in 14 cities simultaneously by phone line, which Chevrolet later described as a first-of-its-kind teleconference. Pete Estes opened by joking that everyone in the room was a charter member of the “Society for the Elimination of Panthers from the Automotive World” (SEPAW), and that this would be SEPAW's first and last meeting. Then he announced it: Camaro.

Two thousand words beginning with C

The joke was aimed at the car's outgoing code name, which had been an open secret. For two years, as word spread that Chevrolet was building a Mustang rival, newspapers and magazines had called it the Panther; early styling mock-ups, by one account, even wore a different name, Chaparral. Chevrolet later said it had always intended a C name for the car, and SEPAW was a way of retiring the speculated one in public, with a laugh, before the real name could be misreported.

Every Chevrolet passenger-car line of the time began with a C (Corvair, Chevelle, Chevy II, Corvette), and the new car's name had to follow the pattern. The division's merchandising people drew up a list of more than 2,000 candidate words starting with that letter. The one that survived came, by Chevrolet's own account, from merchandising manager Bob Lund and GM vice president Ed Rollert, who found “camaro” in an old French-English dictionary, listed as slang for friend, pal or comrade. The account most often repeated names it as Heath's, in a 1936 edition. If that's right, the book was already thirty years old when it supplied the name of Chevrolet's newest car.

Estes put it in the language of a press release. Camaro was “a name which is lithe and graceful,” he said, “in keeping with our other car names beginning with C. It suggests the comradeship of good friends, as a personal car should be to its owner.” And then, more usefully: “To us, the name means just what we think the car will do… go.”

The pushback

The press did not take the dictionary story on trust. When Motor Trend revealed the name in its September 1966 issue, it noted that French speakers had never heard of the word; the standard French is “camarade,” the root of the English “comrade.” Ford, with every reason to enjoy the argument, went looking too. Its researchers reported rather less flattering meanings: a Spanish word very close to it, “camarón,” means a kind of shrimp, and one account turned up an archaic slang term for loose bowels.

Chevrolet did put the entry in front of readers. Car Life's October 1966 introduction of the car opened with a reproduced dictionary column reading “camaro [kamaro], s.m. P: Comrade, pal.” The page names no book, but the entries around it (camarilla, camarin, camarine, cambial, cambiste) are those of Heath's Standard French and English Dictionary, the American edition of Harrap's Standard, in which “camaro” is marked P, for popular speech. Every scanned printing from 1934 through 1968 carries the same entry, while the smaller 1903 Heath's dictionary has no “camaro” at all. So the book Chevrolet pointed to is real and does list the word. What it cannot show is that anyone in France was still saying it, which is what Motor Trend's French speakers doubted. The friend-and-comrade story is best read as Chevrolet's own origin tale, resting on a real but obscure dictionary entry, rather than a settled etymology.

A small, vicious animal

What did stick was an answer given to reporters who kept asking what a camaro actually was. Chevrolet's people (product managers and other executives, in most accounts, rather than Estes himself on the stage) said it was “a small, vicious animal that eats Mustangs.” It outlived the whole etymology debate. Fifty years later, Chevrolet's own release marking the name's anniversary repeated the line as something “some Chevrolet managers reportedly said,” and the company has reached for it in its marketing on and off ever since. It's the closest thing the car has ever had to an official motto.

A name that outlasted its argument

The shrimp jokes faded quickly; the name did not. Camaro stayed on the car through six generations, with a break for the 2003–2009 model years, from 1967 to 2002 and again from 2010 to 2024, while the Firebird, the Panther code name's other offspring, ended in 2002 and never came back.

The code name had the last word in its own way. On June 5, 2023, Chevrolet announced a Collector's Edition for the 2024 model year on LT/RS, LT1, SS and ZL1 trims in North America, with a panther worked into the fender script. Chevrolet Performance design director Rich Scheer said the team found it “fitting for this Collector's Edition Camaro to officially recognize the significance of the original code name and share it with Camaro enthusiasts.” LT/RS, LT1 and SS versions received Panther Black Metallic Tintcoat; ZL1 received Panther Black Matte, which Chevrolet described as the first factory matte paint on Camaro. The edition revived a 1960s development name for the final model year of the sixth generation.

Chevrolet's June 28, 2016 anniversary announcement came fifty years to the day after the name-reveal press conference. The activities it announced were scheduled for August: a celebration and plant tours at Lansing Grand River on August 18, Camaros and Coffee in Detroit on August 19, and a Camaro heritage display at the Woodward Dream Cruise on August 20. These were the announced event dates, separate from the June anniversary of the name. How the program itself was approved is in the car that almost wasn't approved.

Did you know

• Reporters at the June 28, 1966 announcement were handed dictionaries. Detroit Free Press reporter David C. Smith, who was there, recalled the flyleaf carrying the "new word" Camaro and a boast that these were the only dictionaries in the world that contained it. Webster's, he noted in 2016, still didn't.
• Bob Lund, credited with finding "camaro" in that dictionary, was no early Mustang believer. Hagerty's account has Lund, then an assistant general sales manager, taking one look at the first Mustang and saying it would never sell. Once the Camaro was approved, he said, the sales team was thrilled.
• The name did not land well outside Detroit. Hagerty quotes the Los Angeles Times saying a 30-member press gathering at the Beverly Hilton reacted with silence, and the San Francisco Examiner reporting that its reporters' first thought was "He must be kidding."
• Panther wasn't only a rumor. GM's own photographs show F-body prototypes wearing Panther script: on the front fender of a November 1964 model and above the grille of the Rally Sport prototype in October 1965. Chevrolet's later line that it always meant to use a C name sits oddly beside that.
• Some observers at the time linked the retreat from Panther to GM's bruising 1966 traffic-safety hearings. Hagerty quotes a columnist arguing GM had been scared off names that "subtly encourage speed by exciting images of power and violence." Ate Up With Motor likewise says executives grew nervous about the cat's aggressive connotations.
• Ford enjoyed the guessing game. Hagerty reports Ford ran a mocking TV ad with a panther failing to catch a Mustang, and that Ford PR people told any reporter who'd listen that Chevy's copycat should be called the Parrot.

Sources for these details

• David C. Smith, "Looking Back on Half-Century of Camaro Camaraderie," WardsAuto, Sept. 21, 2016 Period magazine
• Gary Witzenburg, "How Chevrolet created the Camaro to take on Ford's Mustang," Hagerty Media, Oct. 23, 2019 Reference
• John Roe, "First-Gen Camaro (1967-69): The one that picked a fight," Hagerty Media Reference
• David W. Temple, "Developing the Camaro," Old Cars Weekly (GM Media Archive photos and captions) Period magazine
• Chevrolet, "Chevrolet Announces Camaro 50th Anniversary Activities," June 28, 2016 GM press release
• Ate Up With Motor, "First, Foremost: The First-Generation Chevrolet Camaro Z/28" Reference
• Chevrolet, "Chevrolet unveils Camaro final Collector’s Edition," June 5, 2023; 2024 model year, North American trim and paint scope Chevrolet manufacturer announcement
• Chevrolet, "Chevrolet Announces Camaro 50th Anniversary Activities," June 28, 2016; announcement reproduced in MyAutoWorld Archives, August 18–20 event schedule Manufacturer release reproduced by a third-party archive; original URL unavailable on October 26, 2026

Sources and method