It was hard to miss that this year’s SEMA show was heavily sponsored by Ford Motor Company. “Powered by Ford” was on almost every promo banner in sight. However, you’d spent too much time in the Ford booth if you didn’t come away with the impression that the real crowd favorite this year, the true power behind this year’s show, was the Chevrolet Camaro.
Sorry Ford, you can’t buy enthusiasm
It was impossible not to notice. It seemed that everywhere you looked someone had a Camaro in their booth. If they didn’t, the booth across from them did. It might be natural to assume General Motors shelled out big bucks for all the product placement but surprisingly they didn’t.
The automaker only had a hand in ten of the Camaros on the show floor, all of them located inside the GM booth. Four of those were built in house with five others being given to outside shops for modification. In short, any Camaro seen outside GM’s product display was bought, paid for, and modified without any assistance from the automaker. That’s quite a feat considering that every single Suzuki Kizashi (all four of them) were bought and paid for by Suzuki and the numbers of previous generation Mustangs out numbered the 2010 model by 3-to-1 easily.
Of the cars GM built, some were hints at future production options and colors (for example the green Synergy Concept), one was built for Jay Leno (an amazing twin-turbo V6, seen below), and a small handful sported graphics packages that Facebook fans voted on a few weeks ago.
Of the cars General Motors and Chevrolet didn’t help get to the show, the modifications varied from mild to wild. Some sported simple wheel and ground-effect kits while a small handful had gotten an amazing supercharged LS9 Corvette engine transplant. Many of the show Camaros left us drooling and some left us scratching our heads, like this “Hot Wheels” inspired car we found outside.
The Camaro pace car (seen in this articles introductory image and below) had to be one of the classiest cars at the show.
We spent nearly the entire week at SEMA walking around taking photos of all the various Camaro show cars and still couldn’t capture them all. How many were there? We just don’t know for sure, but easily could guess 100+. Out of those, we caught about 60 before wearing our shoes out.
Check out our full 2009 SEMA Camaro show car gallery… Leave a comment and let us know your own choice for best and worst.
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November 13th, 2009 at 12:32 am
I figured half of GMs 5 month Camaro sales were at SEMA. I even got a general e-mail for the use of a Camaro for SEMA, and the owner would get in return free parts! I got another e-mail stating he had found one.