Muscle Cars
Muscle car is a term for a high-performance American car, by some definitions an intermediate" sized car fitted with a large displacement V8 engine. Historically they were all rear-wheel drive, but that changed with technological advance.
The "muscle car" term proper was originally applied to mid-1960s and early 1970s special editions of mass-production cars which were designed for drag racing, though it shortly entered the general vocabulary through car magazines and automobile marketing and became used generically for "performance"-oriented street cars.
By some period definitions and perceptions, the term muscle car came to connote high performance at budget prices, where extremely powerful engines were put into relatively bare-bones intermediate cars at extremely affordable prices. This wave, exemplified by the 1968 Plymouth Road Runner and companion Dodge Super Bee, were meant to undercut more expensive, more stylish, and better appointed cars such as the Pontiac GTO, the Chevrolet Chevelle, the Ford Mustang and the Chevrolet Camaro.
