426HP Camaro for 101-Year-Old

Virgil Coffman is the name of the man who bought a bright yellow, 426 horsepower Camaro SS in September. Nothing unusual with that, but wait until you hear this: Coffman is eight months older than General Motors itself! Yes, you’ve got it right: Coffman, a resident of Decatur, Illinois, turns 102 in January 2010.

So who says that old people are not entitled to drive fast and furious cars? Coffman didn’t buy the Camaro after seeing the ‘Tranformers’ movie, as you might have thought, but says he just liked the way it looked and that only 1,500 are to be produced.

Urged by the need to get his hands on one of the special edition Camaros, he traded in a Chevy Monte Carlo for the new car. “Driving by myself, I didn’t need one of those big cars anymore.” Coffman was quoted as saying by nytimes.com. “I wanted a sportscar.”

General Motors also felt the 101-year-old is not just one of its usual customers, so it treated him with a flight to Detroit to show him around a design studio and its Heritage Center. And the interesting part is yet to come: Coffman even worked for GM from 1950 until 1973, first making bumpers for Cadillacs and later as a chemist. He has owned 35 to 40 different vehicles, but he says he likes his new Camaro the most.

“The way it looks and the way it handles — you can’t beat it,”  he says. “People you don’t even know come up and talk to you in a parking lot.”

Since September, Coffman covered about 1,800 miles with his new car. And before you start joking about it, let us tell you that he keeps the speed down, most of the time. “Once in a while I like to kick it up,” he said. “But I’m afraid to drive too fast and get a ticket, and then they might take my license away.”