1968 Chevrolet Chevelle SS 396: A New Body, and the One Year the Super Sport Series Had a Truck

Car Life put its question in the headline deck of its July 1968 road test: “Really now, this is a truck?” The subject was a Chevrolet El Camino carrying the SS 396 name. That year the pickup was not an El Camino with a big engine added but a full member of the SS 396 series, alongside the sport coupe and the convertible. The magazine’s example had the 350-horsepower 396 and Turbo Hydra-Matic. It ran the quarter mile in 14.80 seconds at 94.93 mph with emission controls, street tires and the standard 3.31:1 axle. By the magazine’s own dividing line of 15 seconds, that made it a supercar.^1,2

The pickup’s place in the series came with a new Chevelle. For 1968 the intermediates were redone on two wheelbases, 112 inches for the two-door cars and 116 for the four-doors, wagons and El Camino, which Car Life described as a Chevelle on the sedan’s wheelbase with a cargo bed in place of the rear seat and trunk. The SS 396 stayed a separate series, now with three Fisher Body style numbers: 13837 for the sport coupe, 13867 for the convertible and 13880 for the El Camino. ChevelleStuff calls 1968 the only year the El Camino was offered in the SS 396 series. After 1968 the El Camino got its SS through option equipment instead.^3,1,2,4

Chevrolet’s full-line brochure for the year sold the SS 396 as a sport coupe and convertible, and it did not show the pickup. Its copy promised an exclusive hood announcing a 325-hp Turbo-Jet 396, a special black grille, wide-oval red-stripe tires and body-side striping, with Strato-bucket seats and a new console available at extra cost. ChevelleStuff fills in the rest of the identity. The lower body was painted black whatever the car’s color, the hood carried twin simulated scoops, and a 12-bolt rear axle was standard, with Positraction optional. The base car still came with a bench seat, a heavy-duty three-speed and only a speedometer and fuel gauge.²

Chevrolet’s production figures, reconciled by the reference against the last reported VIN at each plant, show where the SS 396 buyers went. The tabulation lists 55,309 sport coupes, 2,286 convertibles and 5,190 El Caminos, 62,785 SS 396s in all, excluding 26,118 Canadian-built cars of every kind. Sport coupes made up about 88 percent of the series. The El Camino outsold the convertible by more than two to one, and the convertible’s 2,286 was well under half the 5,429 SS 396 convertibles built in 1966. Separately, 1,161 SS 396 sport coupes and 108 convertibles were produced for sale in Canada.^2,5

Engines tell a more ambitious story than 1967’s. The option report records 12,481 L34 350-horsepower engines at $105.35, about one SS 396 in five, and 4,751 L78 375-horsepower engines at $237.00, about one in thirteen. That L78 total is nearly eight times the 612 counted the year before, when the engine had been a late, unannounced option. The 325-horsepower L35 remained the base engine, with no separate count. Across the whole 464,699-car line tabulation, El Camino included, the 375-horse engine still went into roughly one Chevelle in a hundred.^2,6

Chevrolet reserved two transmissions for the SS 396 alone. The Turbo Hydra-Matic 400 went into 21,539 cars, about a third of the series, and the M22 close-ratio four-speed into 1,049. Both listed at $237.00. Four-speed buyers otherwise shared the M20 wide-ratio (38,933) and M21 close-ratio (11,208) units with the rest of the Chevelle line. The line total also shows the car being dressed up as much as speeded up. Buyers took 18,934 sets of special body-side accent stripes, 31,149 sets of rally wheels, 5,377 sets of red-stripe F70-14 tires and 28,685 white-stripes. Front disc brakes, at $100.10, went into 12,835 Chevelles.²

Car Life’s El Camino shows what a buyer could make of the series. It listed at $2,949 FOB factory and came to $4,179 as tested with the 350-horsepower engine, power steering, power disc brakes, bucket seats, console, Positraction, tilt wheel, instrument panel option and AM radio. It weighed 3,760 pounds at the curb and carried 58.3 percent of its test weight on the front wheels. The magazine noted that the 396 weighed 243 pounds more than the standard V8. It ran 0-60 mph in 6.8 seconds and returned 10 to 14 mpg in normal driving. The Turbo Hydra-Matic, Car Life said, shifted quickly and firmly every time.¹

Car Life did not hide the pickup’s compromises. On its handling course the El Camino understeered strongly, and body roll and soft shocks made balancing it with the throttle awkward. On rough roads the rear axle hopped, and the body shook and flexed noticeably. The magazine blamed the lost torsional rigidity of a sedan turned into a pickup. The brakes impressed it, stopping from 80 mph at 25 and 26 ft/sec² before fading slightly. It mocked the tachometer as too small to read. Its verdict was still warm: the El Camino was more comfortable than a truck, carried more than a station wagon, and with the 396 went “like the hammers.”¹

The magazine also passed along Chevrolet’s own sales research on who bought such a thing. According to Car Life, the research found many buyers who wanted a performance car that could do something useful, mostly men in the Southwest and on the Pacific Coast. It also reported that many El Camino owners had only the one vehicle, and that two-thirds of El Caminos were used to tow trailers. Those are Chevrolet’s findings as the magazine reported them, not independent data, and they cover the El Camino generally rather than the SS 396 alone. They still help explain why 5,190 SS 396 pickups outsold the convertible.^1,2

The 1968 arrangement lasted one season. For 1969 Chevrolet dissolved the SS 396 series into RPO Z25, an option package that could be ordered on the V8 Malibu sport coupe, convertible and El Camino, and for that year only on the 300 Deluxe coupes. On the order form the El Camino kept its Super Sport, but never again as a model of its own. Motor Trend found the 1969 supercars essentially unchanged from 1968, and on that same body the option report counts 86,307 Z25 packages. The new body, the SS 396 El Camino and a near-eightfold jump in L78 sales make 1968 the hinge between the SS 396 as a model and the SS 396 as an option.^4,7,2