2017 Chevrolet SS: The Last Year, When Holden's Plant Closed the Book

2017 was the last model year for the Chevrolet SS, and production ended for good reason: Holden's Elizabeth, South Australia assembly plant, the sole source of every SS built, closed at the end of the export contract that had brought the car to American Chevrolet dealers since 2014. Two program-wide totals for the whole 2014-2017 run disagree by a small but real margin: SlashGear reports 12,924 SS sedans built across the four model years, while an Australian trade-press wrap-up of the export program's end instead gives 12,953 exported to the US over the same contract, a 29-unit gap neither source explains, since one may count factory production and the other exports, two bases that need not match exactly.^1,2

That same export wrap-up reports 4,008 SS sedans shipped in the program's final twelve months of production, roughly mid-2016 to mid-2017 rather than a clean calendar or model year, alongside a US calendar-year 2017 sales figure of 4,055 and a final tail of just 46 more cars sold in 2018 as dealer inventory ran out. None of these figures isolates the 2017 model year specifically in the way this record's other years are scoped, a genuine gap in the data that persists right through the SS's final year despite the program otherwise being reasonably well documented.^2,3

The 2017 color palette shuffled from the year before: Chevrolet's own 2017 brochure lists eight colors, adding Nightfall Gray Metallic and an extra-cost Orange Blast Metallic, while Jungle Green, Mystic Green, and Some Like It Hot Red Metallic, all shown in the 2016 brochure, disappeared from the lineup. Across the whole program, Phantom Metallic Black was by far the most popular color, 4,789 cars or 37.1 percent of the entire four-year run, while some shades sold in genuinely tiny numbers: Alchemy Purple Metallic, offered only in 2015, reached just 61 cars, and Jungle Green Metallic, offered 2015 through 2016, totaled only 78.¹

SlashGear's own breakdown of the 12,924-car program shows the automatic dominating: 10,279 automatics against 2,645 manuals across the three years the manual was offered, and within each group most cars skipped the sunroof, 1,058 of the 10,279 automatics and 543 of the 2,645 manuals built without one. The SS itself measured 114.8 inches on the wheelbase, 195.5 inches long, 74.7 inches wide, and 57.9 inches tall, riding on 245/40R19 front and 275/35R19 rear summer tires, dimensions the 2017 brochure states without change from the sedan's established proportions.¹

The 2017 brochure certifies the LS3 at 415 horsepower at 5,900 rpm and 415 lb-ft at 4,600 rpm, the same headline numbers the SS had carried since its 2015 SAE certification, with EPA fuel economy rated 14 city, 22 highway, and 16 combined for the automatic and 14, 22, and 17 for the manual. A separate hobby blog claims a more specific 2017 total of 4,008 built or sold, including 262 in silver of which 53 were manuals, attributing the figures to unspecified GM data without making clear whether it means built or sold cars; that figure happens to match the export wrap-up's "final 12 months" number closely enough to be interesting, but the two are not confirmed to describe the same population, so it is held as an unpublished lead rather than folded into the record's own reported totals.