2026 Greenwood Car Show: General Motors

It's my biggest car spotting day of the year, the Greenwood car show. Let's start with GM.

With GTOs, you may be looking at a "tribute car" which is a polite name for "fake". Take an ordinary Pontiac LeMans, update the engine and the badges, and you've got a much more valuable GTO. Both this 1969 GTO Judge and this 1968 convertible appear authentic to me, though the Judge doesn't have the correct air cleaner to make the ram air induction system work. Fun fact: When the Judge was first offered, it only came in this color.

I've posted this incredible car before, but there's nothing more amazing than seeing a fuel-injected 1963 Corvette split-window.

Restored 1957 Bel Air convertibles like this one sometimes go for over $100K now. The hardtop coupes aren't much less. Always interesting to compare them to a car that's never been restored, like the sedan here. That off-pink color looks odd today but was popular in the 50s.

Very nice 1966 Sting Ray.

The 1970 Chevelle Super Sport is considered the pinnacle of GM muscle. This one has the 396. The truly legendary examples have the 454.

This 1964 Pontic LeMans coupe has 326 badges, but it appears the owner has dropped a 389 tri-power engine under the hood.

This 1948 Buick is just a great looking car.

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1948 Crosley CC Wagon

In 1946 the smallest car made by General Motors was 16 and 1/2 feet long and weighed nearly two tons. The fact that the big automakers didn't make any "small" cars that were actually small created a niche market for the independent automakers. After World War II, Studebaker and Nash both went with new designs that were shorter than the shortest Chevrolet. But even those cars were big compared to this Crosley CC Wagon. The Crosley company was owned by Powell Crosley who also owned the Cincinnati Reds. The year that the wagon pictured was made, Crosley sold nearly 25,000 cars.

Crosley was responsible for numerous innovations that would eventually be adopted by other automakers. From Wikipedia, "Crosley introduced several "firsts" in the American automobile industry, including the first use of the term 'Sport Utility' in 1948 (albeit on an open model based on the wagon, not a wagon on a truck chassis); first mass-market single overhead camshaft (SOHC) engine in 1946; first slab-sided postwar car, also in 1946; first all steel-bodied wagon in 1947; first American car to be fitted with 4-wheel caliper type disc brakes in the 1949 model year (Chrysler Imperial introduced four-wheel disc brakes as standard equipment on Crown Imperials at the beginning of the 1949 model year, but they were not of the caliper type); and the first American sports car, the Hotshot, in the 1949 model year. 1950 brought the Farm-O-Road model, a 63-inch (1,600 mm) wheelbase utility vehicle predictive of the John Deere Gator and other UTVs."

 

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