Origins
The car that almost wasn't approved
GM said no before the Mustang made it say yes.
Bunkie Knudsen had earlier seen an early Chevy II-based sporty-car clay and declined it — “the one thing we don't need right now is another car.” GM was cautious about proliferating models beyond what it thought the market could absorb.
The project revived only after the April 1964 Ford Mustang proved a huge, immediate market GM had no answer for. Ed Cole pushed a competitor through on a crash schedule; the “Panther” program became the Camaro, introduced by Pete Estes and shown to the public in September 1966.
Internally it was project XP-836, built in Chevrolet Studio 2 at the GM Technical Center in Warren, Michigan — nicknamed the “F Car” before it even had a name. Bill Mitchell, GM's overall design chief, oversaw styling; day-to-day design fell to Chevrolet studio stylist Henry Haga, reporting to Dave Holls, with Chuck Jordan and Irv Rybicki also contributing. Interior design is credited to Suzanne Vanderbilt and Cathy Kascur — two of the very few women with visible design credits at GM in this era.
Pontiac got its own version of the same program almost by accident. John DeLorean had been pushing hard for a two-seat Pontiac sports car codenamed Banshee; Ed Cole said no to that, but offered DeLorean a Pontiac-badged version of the same F-body instead. Pontiac's engineers gave their car — the Firebird — its own suspension tuning and styling, and Chevrolet deliberately staggered the launches: Firebird reached showrooms February 23, 1967, five months after Camaro, so the two GM siblings wouldn't collide in the same news cycle.
Decades later, the designers themselves weren't sentimental about it. Mitchell and Rybicki, by then both GM Styling vice presidents, described the finished car in retrospective interviews as a compromised “committee car” — Mitchell reportedly said, “I can't remember what the hell they look like.” History disagrees with him: the first-generation Camaro is treated as a design classic by nearly every other source in this research.
Sixty years later, the 2024 send-off “Collector's Edition” deliberately reached back and used that original code name — Panther — one last time.