It’s a tidier package overall, losing a couple of inches of wheelbase and length and an inch of width compared with the outgoing car. It helps that, at 3760 pounds, this new car is about 100 pounds more trim than a similarly equipped fifth-generation car. What’s a bit more unexpected this time around is the level of precision with which this Camaro moves. There have been plenty of quick and bawdy Camaros over the years, though. It even responds quickly to paddle-activated manual shifts. The eight-speed automatic is a pretty spectacular piece of work, and that’s coming from the Save the Manuals people. The Camaro’s engine is tuned to let out a brief bawl on full-throttle upshifts, which, it must be said, are exactly as firm as we’d like. This is a welcome bit of antisocial behavior compared to the Mustang GT’s relatively demure-sounding engine. Our loaded, $47,480 test car came with an optional dual-mode exhaust ($895), which does nothing at all to increase horsepower but makes the Camaro SS sound like it’s absolutely furious-spitting and barking mad. The infotainment screen’s surround and the instrument-binnacle trim are hard and chintzy, but who ever taps on those things, other than us? The mix of interior materials, while not exactly Mercedes-level, are nonetheless a marked improvement on those of the old car. The steering wheel is perfectly contoured, as if our hands had formed it out of warm clay. The seats in our SS test car are simply fantastic-supportive and firm with just the right amount of bolstering. The tanklike construction also prevents much light from entering the cabin, which, even with our test car’s bright-red upholstery accents, makes every drive in the Camaro feel like an adventure in spelunking. The interior of the Ford Mustang feels ballroom-spacious by comparison. We adjusted to it, partly by accelerating hard before performing lane changes just to clear some room. That styling-with its narrow slits for side windows, fat C-pillar, and short rear glass-has, indeed, done nothing to improve the outward visibility in this new car. A sports coupe so ass-kickingly good, in fact, that the company could have bolted the body of the old Malibu Maxx to it and we’d still fight over the keys.īut we’re getting ahead of ourselves. What we didn’t know during our early peep at the final design was how beautifully all of this componentry would work together to form such a kick-ass sports coupe. And, of course, we knew that it would carry the Corvette Stingray’s brawny 6.2-liter LT1 small-block V-8 in SS versions. We knew that the new Camaro would be lighter than the old one, in part because it would ride on a version of the Alpha platform that serves Cadillac so well in the ATS and the CTS. We asked a designer: What have you done to improve the outward visibility of this new car over the last one? He replied something along the lines of “Camaro owners haven’t told us that that was something they felt needed to be improved and they liked the styling of the car.” First Drive: 2016 Chevrolet Camaro SS Manual.2016 Chevrolet Camaro SS Long-Term Road Test.
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