Everyone and their mother know the American pony car landscape is changing forever, starting with 2024. Next year, there will be no more Dodge Charger and Challenger with V8s, possibly no more Challenger at all, and the Chevy Camaro is also ending its sixth lease of life with no replacement in sight.
Things look great for the Blue Oval company's Ford Mustang S650. With EcoBoost, two Coyote V8, GTD versions on the street, and a trio of motorsport variants, it's closer than ever to the statute of limitations for a proper sports car. And they don't even have to try hard to succeed – as far as we know, the Camaro has retired with no planned successor, and the Charger reverted to a two-door lifestyle but with EV prowess under the hood.
However, not everyone wants to leave the S650 alone in the US automotive market. And when the OEMs don't do their work, these intrepid folks also take matters into their own hands, or rather at the tip of their CGI brushes, as is the case with the imaginative realm of digital car content creators. More precisely, the good folks behind the Real Automotive channel on YouTube have the latest scoops coordinated with their unofficial CGI depictions of the hypothetical Chevrolet Impala SS revival.
Yep, you read that right – the channel's pixel master has wild dreams of the legendary Impala coming back to life as a modern foe. Produced intermittently for model years 1958 to 1985, 1994 to 1996, and then also 2000 to 2020, the Impala was always Chevrolet's popular flagship passenger car and one of the best-selling locally-made automobiles in the United States.
Unfortunately, the late 2015s to early 2020s drive to ditch passenger cars in favor of crossovers, SUVs, and trucks left us without the four-door sedan – and today, we can only buy the affordable $25k Malibu mid-sizer from Chevrolet. Alas, this CGI expert decided to have a go at bringing back something that could defend the lost honor of the Camaro series and place itself between the cheap Malibu and the $68k+ Chevrolet Corvette C8.
Curiously, the channel's host and the resident virtual artist decide to go down the easy route – they imagine the sporty Impala SS could easily be reborn not as a four-door passenger car but rather as a two-door muscle car that just takes the allure and possibly the platform of the current Camaro and stretches them better to fit the larger appeal of the Impala moniker.
So, would you like to see Chevy revive the Impala SS on the backbones of the current Camaro but with larger dimensions and more space inside, or is this just more of the same uninspiring stuff that led to the latter's demise in the first place?
Aurel has aimed high all his life (literally, at 16 he was flying gliders all by himself) so in 2006 he switched careers and got hired as a writer at his favorite magazine. Since then, his work has been published both by print and online outlets, most recently right here, on autoevolution. Full profile
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