1970 Chevrolet Monte Carlo SS 454: A Big Block in a Tailored Suit

When Chevrolet put the Monte Carlo on sale on September 18, 1969, the man running the division had not built it. John Z. DeLorean had been promoted from Pontiac to Chevrolet the previous February, and Mac's Motor City Garage notes that the new personal-luxury coupe was already finished by the time he arrived. The irony runs deeper than timing. At Pontiac, DeLorean had directed the development of the Grand Prix, the Monte Carlo's corporate sibling. His first new car at Chevrolet was therefore a cheaper cousin of the car he had just left behind, sharing its long-hood proportions and, as the next year's figures would show, competing for the same buyers.^1,2

The idea was older than DeLorean's tenure. Ate Up With Motor traces it to Pete Estes, who came over from Pontiac to replace Bunkie Knudsen as Chevrolet general manager in July 1965 and pushed for a personal Chevrolet to take on Ford's Thunderbird. Dave Holls, then group chief designer for Chevrolet, and designer Terry Henline, a Fisher Body Craftsman's Guild finalist, produced the shape, with Henline using the Cadillac Eldorado as what the history calls a loose conceptual starting point. Inside General Motors the program was known as the C-Bird, a name Mac's Motor City Garage reads as an obvious nod to the Thunderbird, and it credits the final design to Bill Mitchell's organization with Holls as advanced studio chief.^3,1

The engineering trick was a stretch in exactly the right place. Instead of the 112-inch A-body coupe chassis, Chevrolet started from the 116-inch sedan and wagon platform, and the Monte Carlo rode a special version of the four-door frame with the extra four inches of wheelbase inserted ahead of the firewall. All of it went into hood. At 205.8 inches overall, the car was 8.6 inches longer than a Chevelle or Malibu coupe. Wikipedia describes a grille of 720 small chromed squares under a thin hood spear. There was one body, a two-door hardtop sport coupe, style 13857; Mac's reports that a convertible was considered but never approved.^3,1,2,4

Price was the weapon. The base car listed at $3,123 with a 250-horsepower 350 two-barrel V8 and power front disc brakes. Wikipedia puts that $218 above a comparable Chevelle Malibu; Ate Up With Motor, comparing a similarly equipped Malibu hardtop, says about $200, and points out that the discs still cost extra on most Chevelles. The rivals lived in another bracket. The same history says the Thunderbird started around $5,000 and seldom left a showroom for less than $6,000, while the Grand Prix started just under $4,000; Pontiac's compiled 1969 table lists the Grand Prix hardtop at $3,866. Automatic, power steering and a radio, almost always ordered, took most Monte Carlos to at least $3,600.^1,2,3,5

Above the base engine the ladder had four more rungs, all gross ratings: a 300-horsepower 350 four-barrel, a 265-horsepower 400 two-barrel, a 330-horsepower 402 four-barrel, and at the top RPO Z20, the Monte Carlo SS, at $420.25. The SS could not be ordered without the 454, rated at 360 horsepower and 500 lb-ft. ChevelleStuff's engine table puts the power peak at 4,400 rpm and Wikipedia's Monte Carlo account at 4,800, and neither lineage settles it. Wikipedia lists the package as the 454 with heavy-duty suspension, wider wheels and tires, SS 454 badging and automatic load-leveling rear suspension: a luxury-car feature bolted to a big-block option.^4,2,3

The order books show how few buyers took the invitation. ChevelleStuff.net, which attributes its quantities to Chevrolet's accumulative production and final model-year reports, lists 145,976 Monte Carlos built for 1970 and 3,823 with RPO Z20. That is about 2.6 percent of the year's Monte Carlos, roughly one in 38. Ate Up With Motor's explanation is the mandatory engine: about half of all Monte Carlo buyers were content with the mild base V8, and the SS option, in its words, 'was not particularly successful.' The Chevelle's own SS 454 package, RPO Z15 at $503.45, went into 8,773 cars in the same reports, 4,475 of them with the 450-horsepower LS6.^4,3

The numbers also explain why the SS 454 was a different animal from the Chevelle that shared its engine. Ate Up With Motor says the Monte Carlo SS weighed about 150 pounds more than a comparably equipped Chevelle, which left it with ample performance but no match for the hottest supercars of the day. It cost less to order, though: Z20's $420.25 undercut the Chevelle's Z15 by $83.20, and the Monte Carlo already carried front discs as standard. What the buyer got for the money was the 454 in the longest-hooded Chevrolet intermediate, with self-leveling at the rear and a list price that stayed within reach of a Malibu buyer.^3,4,2

Labor trouble cut into the first year. Wikipedia says a strike at Flint, Michigan held first-year sales to 159,341 against a projected 185,000, while Mac's Motor City Garage gives first-year sales of more than 130,000. Those are sales figures, and sources disagree on them; neither should be mistaken for production. ChevelleStuff's 145,976 is a build count, and it comes from three plants only, Baltimore, Flint and Van Nuys, with no Monte Carlos listed as built at Atlanta, at Kansas City or in Canada for 1970. The build count sits between the two sales claims, and all three are kept with their basis.^2,1,4

Pontiac felt the Monte Carlo at once. The compiled Pontiac tables record 112,486 Grand Prix hardtops for 1969 and 65,750 for 1970, a fall of about 42 percent, which matches Mac's report that Grand Prix sales dropped nearly 42 percent. Ate Up With Motor concludes that Chevrolet appears to have poached a fair number of Grand Prix sales. Build counts and sales are different measures, so the match is suggestive rather than exact. Either way, the car DeLorean had championed at Pontiac lost more than 46,000 units in the first year of the Chevrolet he inherited.^5,6,1,3,1

The long hood mattered beyond the showroom. Wikipedia notes that the 116-inch wheelbase sat one inch above NASCAR's minimum at the time, and that from 1972 the Monte Carlo became Chevrolet's NASCAR standard-bearer through 1989, chosen for that wheelbase and a long hood that helped weight distribution. Ate Up With Motor counts seven NASCAR manufacturers' championships won for Chevrolet by Monte Carlos between 1972 and 1979. The 1970 SS 454 was not a race car and never pretended to be one, but the proportions its designers stretched for style were the ones the stock-car builders later wanted.^2,3

The SS 454 got one more year. ChevelleStuff's 1971 tables record 1,919 Z20 cars among 128,600 Monte Carlos, after which the package was dropped; the two years together come to 5,742, consistent with Ate Up With Motor's 'fewer than 6,000 buyers.' The Monte Carlo itself went on to close to half a million first-generation sales by that history's count. In 1970 the big block was the rarest way to buy Chevrolet's new coupe, fitted to about one car in 38, and it remains the version that best shows what the C-Bird was: a Grand Prix idea at a Chevrolet price, with a Chevelle engine under the longest hood the division could justify.^7,3,4