2010 Chevrolet Camaro SS - Comparison Tests - Second place
By
AARON ROBINSON
2010 Chevrolet Camaro SS V8 - Short Take Road Test
Baseball, hot dogs, apple pie, and one sinister-looking new Camaro.
Love or hate the styling (some on our panel didn’t exactly love it),
credit GM for modernizing, rather than simply mimeographing, its iconic
sports coupe.
We’d have preferred a reinvention with more visibility,
though. The choptop is pure outlaw, but with 426 horsepower and yards
of hiked-up sheetmetal to mind, the Camaro feels like it has less glass
than a Nikon. The seats are low, and the dash and doors close in like
canyon cliffs, with rear-quarter views pinched by the upswept shoulders
and a tsunami of C-pillar. Smallish side mirrors complete the vision
jamming.
Because you see so much of the interior, we’re thankful that
GM designers committed their best ideas to it: the wing-shaped gauge
pods, the deep-dish steering wheel, the unusual waistband of black
fabric. The console dials—oil pressure, oil temp, volts, and
transmission temp—are welcome, even if they’re down by the floor.
True, our butts eventually grew tired of the hard buckets, and
the back seat lacks reasonable headroom, but our fingers never got
frustrated working the well-placed radio buttons and the tightly
clustered climate controls.
It’s not a Camaro unless it can set fire to a burnout box.
Frankly, we expected the 60-mph mark to arrive sooner than 4.8 seconds.
That’s only a 10th better than the Mustang, which has 111 fewer
horsepower (and is 300 pounds lighter). Still, the Camaro was quicker
through the quarter-mile, and our low-miles test car may still have
been tight. Even if true, the 6.2 socks it to you in the low and
midrange revs much harder than either the peaky Dodge or the Ford. It
also drains the tank quicker, returning 14 mpg to the Mustang’s 17. The
LS3 makes a muffled, less enthralling grumble than the Mustang.
If not quite the bolter we had expected, the Camaro SS carves
nice squiggles, with tamped-down body motions, tacky grip, and a brake
pedal so firm and responsive that we checked it for a Porsche part
number. We wish Porsche had supplied the steering. Shades of Camaros
past are evident in the slightly overboosted and overinsulated wheel.
And the pedals are widespread and offset, making fast footwork a
challenge for all but the size 14s in the group.
As you can see, this Camaro is more multidimensional than the one-trick quarter-milers that used to wear the badge.
To wit, its story is complicated: The stiff, insulated structure
soaks up engine vibes and tire moaning, but the rear end
discombobulates and dances while accelerating over rough pavement. The
freeway chop-chop, though stiffest in this group, is still tolerably
muted, but the clutch takeup is high and abrupt. Palming the Tremec
TR6060’s short, precise shifter is satisfying, but the trunk is small
and its opening smaller. You don’t load bags so much as push them
through a mail slot.
Alas, most of history’s blockbuster cars had faults aplenty.
Continued...
Continued... In This Story
* Third: 2009 Dodge Challenger R/T * First: 2010 Ford Mustang GT * Modern Muscle Car Battle
Antelope Valley Auto.com has a knack for research on cars and anything
and everything about them. And a love for American muscle cars. We work hard to find Automotive information
that our readers want and enjoy.
