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The rumors of the Camaro returning have been churning since the day it died in 2023 and GM said it’s the end of the story, for now. That left a lot of room for the imagination, and it still sounds like the Camaro isn’t dead for good, yet.
In an exclusive interview on the latest episode of The Drivecast, Tony Roma, who is now the Executive Chief Engineer for the Chevy Corvette and Performance Cars at General Motors, told The Drive, “I read all the same things you read or talk about about what people think is coming, but yeah, Camaro is a storied nameplate that we make when it makes sense, and it’s taken a couple of hiatuses here and it’s currently on one.”
Listen to the entire conversation starting at the moment Roma addresses why the Camaro keeps dying and what it would need to be if it returned below.
A hiatus.
The question was why does the Camaro keep dying. The latest reason the Camaro left the market? Roma said, “I can tell you it just didn’t make good business sense to keep going with where we were with the last gen, and I’ve got nothing to comment.”
But what about the Camaro returning and its place in the future Chevy lineup? “The way I look at it is, it’s a situation where, again, it’s a storied nameplate, and so we have these in our past that if the opportunity is right at the right time, we would bring one back, but there’s nothing to talk about today, unfortunately. I mean, I still own a Camaro. I’ve worked on, I worked on the fifth-gen ZL1, I love them, they’re iconic cars,” Roma said.
But the quiet part was said out loud, and it’s the part no car enthusiast wants to hear. Roma noted, “It just doesn’t—it has to make sense. It has to make sense for the whole business, and I know, again, as a car fan, nobody wants to hear that, but this is a business at the end of the day, and it has to make some amount of sense, and that’s where we are.”
Notably, Roma admitted “I think Ford proves there’s still a market for a car called the Mustang, and I think Dodge has been talking about what they’re doing, so I don’t know, you’d have to fill in the blanks there, there’s a lot of blanks to fill in.” The Camaro squared off with the Mustang, and if Ford can prove out a business case that the man in charge of GM’s performance division can see and then sell to the board, the Camaro’s future might already be locked, again.
One of the issues that a Camaro, or a more niche specialized vehicle faces is resources. “The part that nobody wants to think about is the very, very large check that has a lot of zeros on it that has to go upfront, and that has to compete with resources against every other project in the building, right? And so, a lot of times it’s not ‘if we could do something,’ it’s ‘do we choose that to be the highest priority of thing we do,’” Roma said.
Roma, a die-hard enthusiast himself noted that, “And again, I know these are not the answers that car people want to hear sometimes, but it’s the truth, and so when the time is right, if the time becomes right, we’ll do something.”
But in terms of resources a new Camaro would and could be a low lift with costs spread across multiple brands. The Alpha platform the last Camaro rode on was shared with the Cadillac AT4 and CT5. While the current CT5 will be wound down later this year Cadillac’s already confirmed a next-gen car on that platform will arrive in the coming years. Reports peg it arriving around 2028, and more interestingly, reportedly a rear-wheel drive Buick model will be twinned off the platform. The next-gen CT5-V is getting a V8 engine and manual transmission. Both are ingredients for a Camaro. Making a coupe version and spreading the cost between Cadillac, Buick, and Chevrolet to ensure proper production volumes would make sense. Roma didn’t go down this path, but did reconfirm the next-gen CT5 and its Alpha platform are in the plans.
It’s not a leap for a reborn Camaro to arrive as well. As Roma said, Ford’s proven a market for the Mustang, but someone’s going to have to sign off on that “very, very large check that has a lot of zeros on it.”
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As Director of Content and Product, Joel draws on over 15 years of newsroom experience and inability to actually stop working to help ensure The Drive shapes the future of automotive media. He’s also a World Car Award juror.
