#ChevroletImpala

Good news for Canada’s manufacturing sector; GM has confirmed plans to add a third shift to the Oshawa Flex Line to help meet demand for the 2014 Chevrolet Impala.

The days of the six passenger sedan are officially over; with the death of the current generation Chevrolet Impala, the front bench seat is now gone from the North American marketplace.

As part of their bailout package, General Motors agreed that at least 16 percent of its North American production would take place in Canada. The closing of the Oshawa consolidated line may cause GM to be in violation of those terms.

GM has just gotten back to us about the Oshawa Consolidated plant closing down next year, and despite the carefully worded, PR-approved statements, there are some good nuggets of information, and perhaps a couple conclusions to draw from here.

General Motors will announce tomorrow that their consolidated line at Oshawa, currently building both the Chevrolet Equinox and Chevrolet Impala, will close. 2,000 of the 4,000 jobs at the Oshawa plant are located at the consolidated factory, and GM apparently won’t be re-investing in the facility.

GM made immense quantities of full-sized Chevrolets in 1969. How many? According to the Standard Catalog, the total production of ’69 Biscaynes, Bel Airs, Impalas, and Caprices was 1,168,300 cars. Well into the early 1980s, these things were as commonplace on American streets as mid-2000s Camrys are today. Given that nobody with the money to restore a ’69 big Chevy is going to waste time on a non-hardtop four-door (what with the large quantities of restorable coupes and convertibles still extant) we can assume that the few remaining sedans will be flushed out by $250/ton scrap-steel prices and crushed during the next few years.

The outrageous indifference, mixed with distate enthusiasm shown by TTACers for our Chicago Auto Show Video led us to think that it would be a good idea to do one for the New York Auto Show. Unfortunately, Vodka McBigbra’s dental emergency forced me to bounce out of the show halfway through. The video crew was left with an absolute mishmash of first-take cynicism and random Asians wandering through the shots.

The ancient Chevrolet Impala will finally get a replacement, in the form of the 2014 Impala shown above. The newest GM full-size will get a V6 engine, setting it apart from the 2013 Malibu. An eAssist 4-cylinder will be the base engine.

One month is far too premature to make any predictions about 2012’s sales race, but we still got our hands on the data, thanks to independent analyst Timothy Cain. As usual, the Ford F-Series and Toyota Camry were the top dogs.

More than a month has passed since Part 19 of the Impala Hell Project series, partly because I’ve been getting sliced up by sadistic doctors and flying on Elvis-grade prescription goofballs but mostly because the final chapter has been so difficult to write. Here goes!

Summer, 1999: I’d managed to get the Impala into the 14s, barely, with a screamin’ 406-cubic-inch small-block under the hood, but I knew the car would do much better with more traction. Meanwhile, my desire to tell the car’s story coincided with a job move into the maelstrom of dot-com madness.

After painstakingly building a medium-hot 406-cubic-inch small-block engine to replace the Impala’s very tired 350 (motivated by the car’s lackluster quarter-mile performance), 1998 became 1999. Finally the New Engine was ready for swapping.

Before packing up the Impala and leaving Georgia in the fall of 1996, I took the car to Atlanta Dragway and ran some semi-disappointing low-17-second quarter-mile passes. Back in California, I resolved to make some improvements to the car’s running gear. After 15 years as a cheapskate, junkyard-centric gearhead, I was finally willing to spend substantial cash for new aftermarket performance parts. The main question was: what kind of engine would I build?

After I moved from San Francisco to Atlanta and then got a job writing Year One’s catalogs, rubbing elbows with all those drag-race-crazed Southern gearheads on the job meant that it wasn’t long before I took the Impala to the dragstrip.

After I hauled all my stuff 2,500 miles in the Impala and settled in Georgia, it was time for me to go job-hunting. After a few boring office-temp jobs, I spotted an ad that got my attention: Copywriter needed to write catalogs for large auto-parts company. Must know classic American cars. Within minutes of showing up for my interview at Year One, I had my first full-time writing job… and a nickname inspired by my car: Mad Max.