The Sixth Chevrolet Camaro Is Here – This Is What The Fifth-Gen Model Achieved

While by no means the overwhelming success that the first-generation Ford Mustang was back in 1966 – 417,000 were sold in that car’s first twelve months on the market, according to Ford MoCo – the fifth-generation Chevrolet Camaro was a hit by most any other standard.

Now that the sixth-generation Camaro has debuted with surprisingly similar styling to the outgoing model, it’s worth our while to look back at nearly seven years of Camaro sales to gauge the popularity of GM’s Mustang challenger. (Get it? Challenger?)

The main factor for Camaro fans involves the car’s ability to outsell the Mustang. True, the Camaro (and Mustang, for that matter) both put up the kinds of numbers many so-called mainstream cars can’t. But the more appealing measurement is the one which says that in each of the latest Camaro’s complete sales years, from 2010 forward, the Chevy has been the more popular car.

The Camaro outsold the Mustang in the United States by 7,583 units in 2010. In 2011, the fifth-gen Camaro’s best sales year, it outsold the Mustang by 17,811 units. In 2012, the gap decreased to just 1,396 units, but it was still in GM’s favour. In 2013, the Camaro finished 3,381 sales ahead of the Ford. In 2014, as Mustang sales surged in the final two months of the year, Camaro volume jumped 7% to finish the year 3,662 sales ahead.

Naturally, early 2015 figures haven’t been nearly as kind to the Camaro. With a brand new Mustang for model year 2015 and the fifth-gen Camaro reaching the end of its term, the Mustang leads by 18,726 sales over the course of just four months. In fact, even the Dodge Challenger outsold the Camaro in the month of March.

(Challenger sales, as an aside, have always increased despite being significantly lower on an annual basis than the Camaro and Mustang. Reintroduced in 2008, Challenger volume doubled between 2009 and 2014 thanks to persistent U.S. sales growth.)

The Mustang and Camaro are not as consistent in their growth patterns, although the Chevrolet has managed to hover above the 80,000-unit annual sales mark ever since 2010. An average of 84,160 are sold per year in the United States. 2014’s 86,297-unit result was the second-best for the fifth-gen car.

Maintaining a relatively even keel, even in an industry which expanded every year since the car was brought back from the dead, is a notable achievement for a sporting coupe. Consider vehicles like the Nissan 370Z, which saw its sales plunge 45% between 2009, when the industry was in the doldrums, and 2014, when more than 16 million new vehicles were sold. There’s no surprise in seeing Scion FR-S sales tumble 23% in its second full year of availability or fall 29% through the first third of 2015, just three years removed from its launch.

In their home market, Detroit muscle experiences sustained interest in a way conventional “sports cars” do not.

Any number of issues could crop up to bring the sixth-gen Camaro down a rung or two, from a pricing strategy gone awry to an unanticipated economic crisis to aggressive new competition. What can be seen now, however, is a car that doesn’t look so dramatically different from the last Camaro.

Porsche 911s are evolutionary. Since 2004, revamped Ford Mustangs don’t appear wholly removed from the former models, either. Historically speaking, new Camaros share cues with their predecessors, rather than a striking overall resemblance. Then again, perhaps the distinct resemblance between old and new Camaro will do more good than harm. It works for the Honda Accord.

Timothy Cain is the founder of GoodCarBadCar.net, which obsesses over the free and frequent publication of U.S. and Canadian auto sales figures. Follow on Twitter @goodcarbadcar and on Facebook.