The Chevrolet Camaro was supposed to be Chevy’s version of Ford’s Mustang, which was famous for being a powerful car that many people could afford. But when the gas shortage happened, performance cars like these struggled to keep up. Even the Ford Mustang wasn’t as powerful as it used to be.
The 1982 Chevrolet Camaro Berlinetta featured in this Motorweek Retro Review was part of the third generation of Camaros, but it was a bit different. The Berlinetta version was meant to be more luxurious, with a softer suspension and fancier interior.
The car in the review had a 2.8-liter V6 engine, but you could also get it with a 5.0-liter V8. However, neither engine gave great performance, and all Camaros from that time were slow. Even the most powerful version, the 1982 Camaro Z28 with a fuel-injected V8, took a long time to go from 0 to 60 miles per hour.
The review didn’t include a test of how quickly the car could go from 0 to 60 miles per hour, but it did test how fast it could go in a quarter-mile. The Camaro Berlinetta took a whopping 19.4 seconds to do that, and it only reached a speed of 70 miles per hour.
For comparison, a 2015 Mitsubishi Mirage, which had a much smaller engine and fewer cylinders, did the quarter-mile in 18.8 seconds. That’s slow. But it’s interesting to look back and see what cars were like back then.
So, while it might seem like electric cars are taking over now, at least they don’t take as long as 20 seconds to go a quarter-mile like some performance cars from the past did.
