And the horsepower issue is easy enough to remedy, especially with the Chevy and Pontiac. Even Trans Am (the premiere GM performance car of the "post muscle era") was a rattle trap.ĭon't get me wrong. These "issues" are present in most of GM's offerings of the mid-'70s. The materials used for head liners and weather stripping were short-lifed. The "side guard door beams" make the doors EXTREMELY heavy, too, adding to the bounce problem. The door frames don't QUITE "fit", so the doors bounce up and down with road shock. I've never driven one, even when it was "low miles", that wasn't a rattler. Again, not JUST El Camino, but ALL GM "A-bodies" of that era. But the overall quality of construction was woeful. Now, beauty is in the eye of the beerholder, so that one is purely subjective. They're borderline ugly (certain angles and certain trim packages aren't bad). They're bigger and heavier than any of the previous models. It wasn't long before real pickups got sufficiently comfortable to make cartrucks less relevant.To be brutally honest, the '73-'77 A-body, in general, not just Elky, is a major rattle-trap POS. This generation of El Camino was built through 1977, after which the smaller and more angular G-body El Camino carried on until the end.Įssentially a C10 with the comfort of a Monte Carlo. The bandanna gas cap tells us that this Elco didn't get much tender loving care during its final months on the road. My guess is that this cartruck's engine compartment has hosted at least a few engines during its life. Is this that original 350? I didn't feel like getting filthy scraping away ancient schmutz to peek at the block casting numbers to find out. The base engine for the 1973 El Camino was the 307-cubic-inch (5.0-liter) small-block, with just 115 horses and a reputation as one of the least desirable Chevy small-blocks ever made. It appears that the original engine was a 350-cubic-inch (5.7-liter) small-block V8, an optional plant rated at 175 horsepower. In fact, this El Camino may have just the fender from a Classic - lots of mix-and-match parts swappage has taken place here. The El Camino Classic was the truck version of the Malibu (which was an upscale Chevelle trim level at the time but later shoved the Chevelle name aside), with Malibu-style trim and interior bits. The Chevelle got bigger and cushier for the 1973 model year (just in time to be blindsided by certain geopolitical events that gave small-car sales a huge boost), and so the pickup-ized Chevelle also grew larger. Yes, there were decades of business in the front/party in the back for this Elco, but now it's completely used up. Here's a very rough but still identifiable '73, found in a Denver-area car graveyard. I find plenty of discarded Rancheros during my quest for junkyard history lessons, but the El Camino is another story. GM jumped in with the new El Camino for 1959, and- after a dalliance with a Corvair-based cartruck for a few years- sold Chevelle-based El Caminos (and, eventually, their GMC Sprint and Caballero siblings) all the way through 1987. After noting the strong sales of Ford and Mercury coupe utilities (which came to be known as utes) in Australia, Ford introduced the station-wagon-chassis-based Ranchero to North Americans for the 1957 model year.
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