25 Years of the Crusher Camaro

I’m gonna tell the story of the Crusher Camaro because it’s celebrating 25 years as a project and because it’s presented me with a fresh dilemma. The story begins in 1994 when California law allowed gasoline companies to crush older cars in exchange for smog credits that allowed continued polluting from wells and refineries.

- David Freiburger

The bureaucratic presumption was that killing an old car would take it off the road and therefore stop it from polluting, thereby offsetting the smog from the refineries. The deal allowed private parties to sell older cars for $700. Enterprising gearheads found a way to flip a whole mess of old cars that hadn’t been legitimately driven in a decade or more.

I found this wildly bogus and proposed to Jeff Smith—then the HRM editor—that we go to a junkyard and buy an old car out from under the gasoline company’s crusher program. Rob Kinnan and I went to the yard and found a number of potential projects, and then I saw a Scheib-tan ’67 Camaro pulling in the driveway. I ran at full speed to the car and asked the driver if he was turning it in. He said yes, because his son wanted a mini-truck and his wife didn’t want the Camaro in the driveway. The guy had owned it since the ’70s with its inline six and Powerglide trans. I asked if I could give him the $700 so it wouldn’t be crushed, he said yes, and the rest is history.

The car that instantly became known as the Crusher Camaro first appeared in HOT ROD 25 years ago, as we told the story of rolling the car away from the junkyard and over to a Chevron station where it passed an emission test up to the standards of a much newer car. I think it also got 21 mpg. This put the lie to the buyback program.