First, Chevrolet begat Impala. Then Chevrolet begat Chevelle. Then Chevelle swelled up to the size of a small oil tanker and Impala became a cruise liner. Then OPEC crises hit, big cars went out of vogue, and things had to change, and in 1977, Chevrolet turned the big-car Impala and it’s Caprice twin into cars the size of the “mid-size” Chevelle…which would become the Malibu and shrink for 1978. I’ve got a soft spot for the downsized B-bodies and an even bigger soft spot for the 1977-79 “glasshouse” coupe versions of these cars. Blame it on owning two of them years before I was legal to drive, but I find the clean, boxy shape paired off with the bent glass rear window treatment surpringly sexy…well, as sexy as anything from 1977 can be, anyways.
While my 1979 Caprice was perfectly in line with any 14-year-old’s first project car build (305, lowered too far, way too loud, and nowhere near as fast as I thought it was) this 1978 Impala is more along the lines of what I always dreamed of doing. Black paint, polished wheels, and dual quads on a supercharged 454 under the hood make perfect sense to a ninth-grader who can spin a wrench. And it makes sense here…don’t look at this as a race car or a show car, it isn’t one and will take way too much money to bring up to that standard. Instead, picture this as a fun second car, the one you bring to work on sunny days and park right next to that one guy in accounting who won’t shut up about the virtues of his BMW. This isn’t a long-distance commuter (at least, not without swapping the TH400 over to something like a 700R4), but it is the car that will make you smile as you lay into that big-block.
Don’t overthink the application. Just get in, fire it off and understand that just because the factories didn’t get it in the late 1970s, doesn’t mean that the wrongs can’t be fixed. Just resist the urge to slap on Super Sport badges, please.
Whatever…don’t break the back glass! Windows are in houses BMT. 🙂 🙂
I approve this vehicle.
Abhi, I hope you catch on fire.
Reminds me of a t-shirt that I had around the time that this car was new. Injection is nice, but I’d rather be blown!
GM, and everybody else, made some awful cars in the seventies and eighties. But I have to admit especially in this era of front wheel drives that the GM two door B-bodies had a certain appeal that ages well. Especially this one with that bent back glass. Even the front bench seat became mostly extinct after this. I dig it
That’s cool
Cool a impala landau coupe…. pretty hard to find
This is a stolen car from London Ontario Canada.