The Chevrolet Concours - Apparently a real car

I was huge into cars as a kid. Mostly the American iron sleds my parents, grandparents and uncles/aunts/cousins rolled around in. I remember barreling around East Point in a green Plymouth my very old uncle Earnest shouldn't have been driving three kids around in, but we made it home and got the Three Musketeers bars he'd always give us, so no harm done. I think the completely greeness of that car (inside and out) really got me hooked, and by 12 years old I had subscriptions to Road & Track and Car & Driver.

And I had a good friend whose dad worked for Chevrolet. The friend's older brother had a hot-rodded Nova and my friend and his dad later turned a flooded-out 1982 Camaro into a faux Z28 with a Corvette engine. Hot car, that one. I also got a super early look at the new Chevy Citation, which somehow actually seemed interesting at the time.

But I digress. In all my years of being really into cars, I'd never heard of something called the Chevrolet Concours until I saw this ad recently. Sure looks like a Chevy, but ... Concours? (Pronounced like Kahn-Coors - which would be a hell of a collab). Our commercial heroes are tooling around "Europe" showing off this fine ride, and we see it's "A world class luxury compact". But did it actually exist?

Yes! (apparently). If you dig deep enough into the Wikipedia article on the Chevy Nova, you'll discover that in 1976 GM rebranded the Nova LN (for Luxury Nova - not making that up) as the Concours to compete with - wait for it - the Ford Granada and Mercury Monach. Those, if you don't know, are laughably horrible cars. Like, how bad were things at GM that "We have to come up with something to beat the Granada" is a priority?

But the Wiki article also says that in 1976 the Los Angeles Sheriff's Department placed the largest order for compact police cars in history - and it wasn't the damned Granada they chose. It was the Concours!

Sadly, the Concours only lasted two years - replaced by the new-look Chevy Malibu. A darn fine car, I gotta say. The dad of another friend of mine had one.

Credit: A Word From Our Sponsor
Original Video: 45 Minutes of 1970s Commercials