Muscle car

A muscle car is an American-made two-door sports coupe with a powerful engine, generally designed for high-performance driving.^[1][2]

In 1949, General Motors introduced its 88 with the company's 303-cubic-inch (5 L) OHV Rocket V8 engine, which was previously available only in its luxury Oldsmobile 98. This formula of putting a maker's largest, most powerful engine in a smaller, lighter, more affordable vehicle evolved into the "muscle car" category.^[3][4] Chrysler and Ford quickly followed suit with the Chrysler Saratoga and the Lincoln Capri.^[5]

The term "muscle car", which appeared in the mid-1960s, was originally applied to "performance"-oriented street cars produced to fill a newly recognized niche; it entered the general vocabulary through car magazines and automobile marketing and advertising. By the early 1970s, muscle cars included special editions of mass-production cars designed for street and track drag racing.^[6] The concept of high performance at lower prices was exemplified by the 1968 Plymouth Road Runner and companion Dodge Super Bee, whose powerful engines drove relatively basic-trimmed intermediate-sized cars that were meant to undercut more expensive, more stylish, and better-appointed models from General Motors and Ford that had come to define the market, such as the Pontiac GTO (1964), 396 Chevrolet Chevelle (1965), 400 Buick Gran Sport (1965), 400 Oldsmobile 442 (1965), as well as the 427 Mercury Comet Cyclone (1964) and 390 Mercury Cyclone (1966).

By some definitions – including those used by Car and Driver, CNBC, Road & Track, and Motor Trend—pony cars such as the Ford Mustang, Chevrolet Camaro, Plymouth Barracuda, Pontiac Firebird, AMC Javelin, and their luxury companions in that large, influential, and lucrative 1960s–70s niche, the Mercury Cougar and Dodge Challenger, could also qualify as "muscle cars" if outfitted with suitable high-performance equipment.