At $44,000, Would You Call This Underused 2013 Chevy Camaro ZL1 Overpriced?

With 580 horsepower on tap, a six-speed manual, and a bad attitude, today’s Nice Price or No Dice Chevrolet Camaro ZL1 should be a ball to drive. It’s a shame then that it’s only been driven a little over 3,600 miles. Let’s see if its price drives a hard bargain.

I wonder if having grown up around certain cars makes them more desirable later in life. Or, perhaps familiarity breeds disinterest. For those young enough not to know that VW made a pickup version of its Rabbit economy car, much less have been around to see them putting about, the experience today might be all the more enticing. That might mean that cars like the 1981 VW Rabbit ‘Caddy’ pickup we looked at on Friday have a different level of appeal depending on which age strata one inhabits. One thing all generations could agree upon was that our Caddy’s $7,500 price was too high for what it was. That resulted in a 68 percent No Dice loss to end our week.

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There’s this old trope in movie and TV Westerns where one character tells another that “This town ain’t big enough for the both of us.” It was first uttered in the 1929 film, The Virginian and has been used by Hollywood writers time and again ever since. It’s also a pretty great song title by the band Sparks.

I often wonder if it’s also a common phrase around Chevrolet, spoken between the Corvette team and Camaro courtesans. When it comes down to which car Chevy would throw out of the lifeboat first, we don’t have to guess. The brand has unceremoniously dumped the Camaro not once, but twice now. The brand apparently isn’t big enough for two extreme performance sporty cars.

When it comes to performance, few modern Camaros got closer to Corvette territory than today’s 2013 Camaro ZL1. Chevy first applied the ZL1 build code to the 1969 Camaro as a COPO option package. That included an aluminum block V8 along with a number of other go-faster parts. Resurrected for the 2012 — 2015 Camaro, the appellation now denotes a 6.2-liter supercharged V8 good for 580 horsepower and 556 lb-ft of torque.

Here that’s mated to a TR-6060 six-speed stick that has been reinforced to handle the power. Magnetic Ride suspension along with Brembo six and four-piston brakes are additional upgrades included in the package. Suffice it to say, the ZL1 is a Camaro that could make Corvettes of its era very nervous.

This one is very much of its era. It comes with just 3,657 miles on the clock and is described in its ad as being in “excellent” condition. It looks the part too, although the tight confines of the garage in which the ad’s pictures were shot, along with the unflattering fluorescent lighting don’t do the car justice. I’d also wager that this generation of Camaro remains this century’s best-looking edition of the car, so it’s got that going for it.