The Chevrolet division of General Motors launched the first Chevelle for sale in 1963, and they continued to make it through the 1977 model year. In the muscle car era of the late 1960s, the Chevelle was a staggering success. It even provided the basis for the reintroduction of El Camino, and provided the platform on which Chevelle would base the Monte Carlo for 1970.
Chevrolet conceived that first Chevelle to compete with the extremely popular Ford Fairlane. For this reason, the Ford Fairlane would originally provide the inspiration for the Chevelle’s particular size, as well as many of its visual cues. However, the Chevelle would quickly take on a life of its own and Chevrolet would abandon the purpose of competing with the Fairlane in search of even greater success.
During the 1960s and early 1970s, there was a wide variety for each Chevelle model year for sale available to consumers. This was the first time the American auto market saw a model that tried to be everything to all people. There were convertibles, budget sedans, family-friendly trucks, and, of course, the beefy coupes. The Chevelle for sale was also available in the form of exclusive nameplates over the years, such as the Nomad, Nomad Custom, Greenbrier, Concours Estate, and Concours.
Each car in the A-body series featured a pony car offering called Super Sport (SS). In some cases, it was a different model, but in other cases, like the El Camino, the SS was simply an equipment package, the centerpiece of which was a big-block engine. The SS model offered with the first Chevelle for sale was the first of these Super Sport models, and it marked Chevrolet’s first serious entry into what had quickly become a highly competitive sports car segment. Two years after the model, there is a distinctive change in the vehicle, as GM was introducing the body shape of the Coca-Cola bottle where it made sense to do so.
During this period, GM had a restriction for all of its divisions that prevented midsize or smaller vehicles from including a displacement of 400 cubic inches or more. However, this was a period when all sports car buyers wanted the largest possible engine. It wasn’t much more expensive, and fuel and insurance were still relatively cheap. There was a high demand for these large engines, so a dealer outside of Pittsburgh Pennsylvania used the special equipment fleet ordering system as an outlet to meet the demand. Many of these “special” 425 horsepower Chevelles took their own names, such as Berger Chevelles, Sunico Chevelles, and the most famous, Yenko Chevelles.
In 1973, the Chevelle for sale brought with it the largest redesign in the relatively short history of this model. One of the other major changes from that second generation came in 1977 when Chevrolet replaced the SS as the high-performance Chevelle for sale with the Laguna S3 coupe. This happened for a number of reasons, but perhaps the main one was that the image of the SS designation had lost much of its luster along with the shrinking engines of the 1970s. Shortly after this decision, the Chevelle was no longer used. It was selling well and Chevrolet merged it, along with all other similar midsize models, into the Malibu.
