What's Wrong With This Picture: The Search For El Camino Edition

Edward Niedermeyer
by Edward Niedermeyer

It started as a flippant Twitter comment, in which GM Global Marketing Officer Joel Ewanick agreed to champion a return for the “El Camino” if 100,000 potential buyers raised their hands for it. Smelling an opportunity for some publicity, Jalopnik quickly picked up on the “challenge” and urged readers to leave a comment in support of the trucklet. At first Ewanick tried to hedge, saying he needed 100k deposits, rather than blog comments, to approve an El Camino for the US market. But now the former Hyundai marketer has taken Jalopnik’s challenge to Chevy’s Facebook page, giving a surprising amount of credibility for a “challenge” that began with a throwaway tweet. What makes Chevy’s endorsement of the “El Camino Challenge” even more surprising: the total lack of apparent enthusiasm.

According to the most recent update at Jalopnik’s post, only about 3,800 El Camino fans have taken the time to voice their support (although more have reportedly raised their hands on Facebook). Since we can’t independently verify the current count, we’ll refrain from reading too much into what appears to be a fairly disappointing response… especially since GM may have to bring an El Camino to the US whether hordes of enthusiasts get worked up about it or not: after all, with CAFE going up, GM has to either offer smaller, more-efficient pickups or face the exotic, expensive alternatives. Which is actually a good thing. An enthusiast and ironic-nostalgia-driven El Camino (which I’d imagine as an imported, V8-powered Holden Maloo) might enjoy a brief fad (or, based on the hand-raiser numbers, not), but would ultimately flop (hello SSR). Meanwhile a basic, inexpensive, utilitarian-oriented El Camino could offer a uniquely efficient way to help truck-loving Americans out of their $100 fill-up fatigue. While giving GM an opportunity to escape its old Hummer-dominated anti-green image.

In short, fear not enthusiasts: even if the “Draft El Camino” movement fails to reach 100,000 hand-raisers (or, at this point, even 10k), GM will probably bring some kind of “ute” (as they’re known in Oz) to the US at some point. You just have be patient and let CAFE force GM into bringing the products you really want. Bet you never thought you’d read that sentence, did you?


Edward Niedermeyer
Edward Niedermeyer

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  • VanillaDude VanillaDude on May 16, 2011

    It started as a flippant Twitter comment. Enough said.

  • Cyberpine Cyberpine on Sep 02, 2011

    There is a car design that needs to be produced.. but it's not an el camino. It's a muscle car in the shape of an old school wagon, only with a 3 position easy fold down MIDGATE and under BED TRUNK. over the bed a Baja like tubular cage. The bed is hard watertight plastic. RWD using Ultracaps from for high torque axceleratino and a small FWD 4 cylinder combustion for crusing speeds. The ultracaps are mainly sourced by Flywheel Brake assist, but also by the 4 cylinder as needed. Midsized, Two door, 5-6 passengers, 300hp, 4000lb towing, 40mpg city.. yes 40! Something like this: https://lh3.googleusercontent.com/-FISV-un62KU/TmCtKRFRlvI/AAAAAAAAC3s/BqtS9QNta7w/s800/muscle_wagon.png

  • CanadaCraig You can just imagine how quickly the tires are going to wear out on a 5,800 lbs AWD 2024 Dodge Charger.
  • Luke42 I tried FSD for a month in December 2022 on my Model Y and wasn’t impressed.The building-blocks were amazing but sum of the all of those amazing parts was about as useful as Honda Sensing in terms of reducing the driver’s workload.I have a list of fixes I need to see in Autopilot before I blow another $200 renting FSD. But I will try it for free for a month.I would love it if FSD v12 lived up to the hype and my mind were changed. But I have no reason to believe I might be wrong at this point, based on the reviews I’ve read so far. [shrug]. I’m sure I’ll have more to say about it once I get to test it.
  • FormerFF We bought three new and one used car last year, so we won't be visiting any showrooms this year unless a meteor hits one of them. Sorry to hear that Mini has terminated the manual transmission, a Mini could be a fun car to drive with a stick.It appears that 2025 is going to see a significant decrease in the number of models that can be had with a stick. The used car we bought is a Mk 7 GTI with a six speed manual, and my younger daughter and I are enjoying it quite a lot. We'll be hanging on to it for many years.
  • Oberkanone Where is the value here? Magna is assembling the vehicles. The IP is not novel. Just buy the IP at bankruptcy stage for next to nothing.
  • Jalop1991 what, no Turbo trim?
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