The car/truck concept was still alluring though, and in 1964, El Camino returned, this time based on a Chevelle chassis. But if it was blazing a new trail, the El Camino got off to a shaky start after two years of mediocre sales, the model was discontinued. GM first used the name on a 1954 Cadillac concept car, and noted that cars bearing that name were envisioned to be trailblazers, similar to their historical eponym. “El Camino” (literally The Road in Spanish) was meant to evoke the El Camino Real mission trail in California.
That gap, after all, suggested great opportunity for a niche vehicle. Based on the Bel Air, Chevrolet hoped to bridge the wide gap that existed between comfortable cars and utilitarian trucks. The El Camino story dates to 1959, when Chevrolet first added the cross-bred car/truck to its lineup. Along the way, these vehicles became known as “Cowboy Cadillacs” – and that nickname was as true for our featured 1987 model as it was for the first El Camino nearly three decades earlier. Throughout the decades, the concept stayed remarkably true to its original intent. But endure they did – with nearly a million copies having been sold. This slightly modified example is from the Caballero’s final production year of 1987 and can shed some light on one of GM’s rarest models of the 1980s.Įl Caminos and their GMC twins held a unique place in North America’s automotive landscape, being among the few car-based pickups to endure in a marketplace that was generally ambivalent about the concept. For 17 of the El Camino’s 26 model years, GMC offered a badge-engineered version of its own, but with only a few thousand being sold each year, they never became well-known.
Unless it’s a GMC Caballero – the lesser known of General Motors’ half-car/half-pickup vehicles. (first posted ) Nothing looks like an El Camino.
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