Rare & unverified
The Z/28 convertible that wasn't supposed to exist
Chevrolet never offered a factory Z/28 convertible in 1968 — except, apparently, once.
Every official 1968 Camaro record agrees on one thing: the Z/28 package came as a hardtop Sport Coupe only. No convertible Z/28 was ever cataloged, ordered, or built that year — which is exactly why the third generation's 1987 convertible return, and the second generation's total lack of a convertible, get their own attention elsewhere on this site. And yet, according to several independent “rarest Camaro” retrospectives, one 1968 Z/28 convertible exists anyway.
The car reportedly wears the correct 302 V8, close-ratio 4-speed, and heavy-duty suspension of a genuine Z/28, built at the Norwood, Ohio plant — and multiple sources claim it was built as a personal car for Pete Estes, the Chevrolet general manager who had introduced the Camaro to the world less than two years earlier. A previous owner is said to have turned down a $1 million offer for it.
Treat the Estes connection as an attributed claim, not a settled fact — this research hasn't traced it to a factory build sheet or a Camaro Research Group writeup, the kind of primary-adjacent source this site leans on for its highest-confidence claims. But the underlying detail — that a one-off Z/28 convertible exists at all, built on a line that never officially offered one — shows up consistently enough across independent sources to be more than idle rumor. Fittingly, no publicly available photo of the actual car is known to survive; what's pictured here is an ordinary, well-documented 1968 Z/28 hardtop, the body style the factory actually sold.