At $19,000, Is This 1997 Chevrolet Camaro Z28 30th Anniversary Edition Anything Worth Celebrating?

While Chevy has once again given up on the Camaro, today’s Nice Price or No Dice Z28 shows that the company once thought highly enough of the car to throw it a 30th Anniversary party. Let’s see if this low-mileage survivor is now priced to party on.

Suffering from middle child syndrome, such as exemplified by the Jan Brady trope, is something the Lexus GS 300 had to deal with throughout its entire career. Show of hands, how many of you know the exact year the GS was pulled from the Lexus lineup? It was 2020, but, you know what? Nobody cares.

Such ambivalence was evident in the comments on the 2000 Lexus GS 300 Platinum we looked at yesterday. A one-owner car with modest miles and the promise of a well-kept maintenance history, it simply couldn’t muster much enthusiasm over its $8,000 asking price. Ultimately, in Jan Brady fashion, it did manage to eke out a mediocre 51% Nice Price win.

Around the same time that Toyota was printing money through the expansion of the upscale Lexus brand, General Motors was contemplating what to do with its pony car pair, the Chevrolet Camaro and Pontiac Firebird. Both cars rode on the proprietary F-Body platform, which, not being shared across any other higher-production model, meant that every drop in sales numbers made the cars vastly less profitable. In the end, GM decided to send the ponies out to pasture—at least for a while in the Camaro’s case. Killing off the Firebird was much easier as GM eliminated the entire Pontiac division to hide the crime.

Adding insult to injury, the original pony car, Ford’s Mustang, soldiered on with nearly double the sales each year as the Camaro and Firebird, combined. Some may consider imitation to be the sincerest form of flattery, but in the case of GM’s pony car copycats, flattery eventually got them nowhere.

Before GM gave up on the Camaro for the second-to-last time, it threw the car a 30th Anniversary party. Offered for the 1997 model year in celebration of the Camaro’s 1967 debut, the special trim package comprised a unique color scheme of white paint accented by Hugger Orange stripes paired with 30th Anniversary embroidery on each seat’s backrest.

The anniversary package could be ordered on a number of Camaro models, but for our purposes today, it’s part and parcel to this Camaro Z28 T-top automatic.

This Z28 has an exceptionally low 31,000 miles on the ticker and comes with a clean title. It also features the factory 16-inch five-spoke alloys that were a new introduction on the Z28 this model year. Befitting its low miles, the car appears to be in great shape. The paint—which is a big point in getting an anniversary package car—looks clean, and those alloys seem free of any curb rash.

This being a Z28 means it has the 5.7-liter LT1 V8 under the hood. With sequential fuel injection and Z28-unique square-tipped dual exhaust, the mill was claimed to make 275 horsepower and 325 pound-feet of torque. A manual transmission was available in this model, but like most, this one comes with the five-speed 4L60E automatic.

Despite that, the seller claims this to be a “Very fast” car. They also boast that it “Runs and drives great,” and that it comes with “Ice Cold Air Conditioning.”

That all should make it pretty fun, as too should the T-top roof and bucket seat-crazy cabin. There’s leather upholstery on the seating surfaces, and if we can level one gripe about the car’s condition, it’s that the white leather is showing its age. We can also complain about the terrible plastics in the cabin, but age has nothing to do with that. It came from the factory that way.

According to the seller, this Z28’s excellent condition and low miles make it a very rare car. To that end, they are asking $19,000 for the title. That’s just about two grand less than what a base V6 Camaro coupe cost new back in 1997. Of course, this is a high-end Z28 with T-tops and a lot of bells and whistles. If you look around, you’ll also note that Chevy isn’t making any Camaros anymore, so sweet condition used ones like this are the only way to go.

What do you think? Should we go with this 30th Anniversary edition Z28 at that $19,000 asking price? Or should we cancel the party?

You decide!

Nice Price or No Dice:

Phoenix, Arizona, Craigslist, or go here if the ad disappears.

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