This past July Fourth weekend found me back in greater Phoenix, Arizona with friends including Chicago expatriates and their young son, as well as a one-time Phoenix resident who has since moved away. July is the hottest time of the year in that part of the country, with highs having topped out at an average of about 110 degrees Fahrenheit (43 degrees Celsius) for each of the five days I was there. Swimming pools dot the landscape as seen from the plane, and for good reason. In the summer, it’s basically all one does on off-days, say, on the weekends: stay inside and watch television in the cool air conditioning, and then hop into the pool. Rinse and repeat.
Once you’re in the pool and everyone is hanging out and having a good time, it can be tricky to remember to reapply the sunscreen, especially for those having adult beverages (which I wasn’t). Being partially of west African descent and with healthily melanated skin, it is still of importance to me to use sunscreen, as skin cancer doesn’t care about your background. Everyone needs it. All the same, I have a history of sometimes being forgetful during my first, major exposure to the sun for the season, and I end up looking all red, brown, and peely like the poor, tortured finish on this Berlinetta. I didn’t burn this year, but remembering last summer’s disaster, I was acting like the Sunscreen Angel to my Arizona friends during the pool party, borderline-nagging people into reapplying skin protection.
Unlike the sunburn on this Camaro, my overexposure to the sun and resultant peeling skin usually turns into a nice, golden bronze that generally lasts through the end of October. If only it was that easy for a car. Aside from visiting these friends and my annual trips to Las Vegas, I really don’t have a frame of reference to understand what this kind of sun and intense heat like this does to a car’s finish. I did spend years in southwest Florida, but that was a different, humid kind of heat, with temperatures that only occasionally approached those I had experienced earlier this month in Chandler, Arizona. It does somewhat explain the prevalence of white paint on what seemed like three-fourths of the vehicles I had seen while down there. A white exterior finish doesn’t absorb heat, and it tends to keep better over time, or at least not show the defects as obviously.
The Berlinetta was the luxury Camaro, introduced for ’79 to replace the upscale Type LT. I have always found it curious that the Berlinetta didn’t arrive concurrent with the Camaro’s ’78 styling refresh, but maybe Chevrolet saved its introduction in anticipation of the arrival of the all-new ’79 Ford Mustang. I truly love me some early Fox Mustang Ghia, but the lines of the longer, more substantial Camaro lend themselves better to the added flair and drama one might expect of a personal luxury sports car. This one is a 1980 (or ’81) model judging by the wire wheel covers that appeared for ’80 in a bit of decontenting from the previous year’s standard cast aluminum wheels.
“Baby, me without your love is like a Camaro without t-tops…”
The ’80 Berlinetta added extra sound insulation, a more deluxe interior, exterior identification, and a few other modifications (including a 0.3 inch wider front and rear tread, no joke) to the basic Camaro package, for a $763 premium (13%) over the base car’s $5,843 starting price. Non-California cars came standard with a 115-horsepower V6 displacing 3.8 liters, while California cars got a completely different Buick 3.8L V6, with 110 horses. Engine upgrades were available in the form of a 120-hp 4.4L V8, a 155-hp 5.0L V8, and a 190-horse 5.7L V8. (The top engine for the California Z28 was a 165-horse version of the five-liter.) The popularity of six-cylinder Camaros jumped from about 8% in ’79 to about one-third of the ’80 total, undoubtedly driven by the second-wave fuel crisis of that time.
A three-speed manual was standard with the six, with a four-speed standard on 5.7L-equipped cars and and optional for the five-liter, except in California, which came only with the three-speed Turbo-Hydramatic. Automatic was optional across the board. The Berlinetta’s extra luxury added less than forty pounds over the base car’s 3,218-lb. starting weight. Camaro sales took a dive for 1980 over the robust 282,600 units sold the previous year, falling by 46% to just 152,000 units, of which the Berlinetta submodel accounted for just over 17% (26,700). Only the Rally Sport sold fewer copies, at around 12,000 (8%). The base car was the most popular (68,200 units / 45%), followed by the Z28 (45,100 units / 30%).
This ’80 looks good even without a rear spoiler, where some fastbacks seem to need one to look right. Even its F-body cousin, the Pontiac Firebird, seems to need a trunklid spoiler regardless of trim level like I need to wear a belt most of the time. The chrome accents on the rear panel, window surrounds, and wire wheel covers with “Berlinetta” script on the center caps add an age-appropriate touch of class to what would be the more grown-up Camaro for someone who wasn’t yet ready to foreclose on their youth by moving up to Monte Carlo-land.
I chose not to venture into the driveway where this car was parked to get more pictures of it, as I was guest of friends-of-friends nearby (who also had a sick pool setup), so I apologize for the lack of my usual variety of shots of my subject. This factory Dark Brown Burnt-linetta stood as an effective symbol of summer in the southwestern United States, in the land of extreme heat, cacti, and scorpions, where leaving ninety-degree pool water for ambient temperatures of a hundred degrees can make one actually feel cool and shiver for a minute. This was truly a bizarre phenomenon to experience firsthand. Whatever your skin tone, please accept my non-medical advice and reapply that sunscreen every ninety minutes or so, or whatever it says on the label. Just think of the scorched, peeling paint on this Camaro Berlinetta as a reminder to protect your own finish.
Chandler, Arizona.
Tuesday, July 4, 2023.
Brochure pages were sourced from www.oldcarbrochures.org.
Good timing Joseph Dennis.
My first look at CNN.com this AM says: ” It has already been dangerously hot for weeks in Texas, Florida and Arizona, where Phoenix is in the middle of a likely record-breaking streak of consecutive 110-degree days, forcing many businesses and parks to close or readjust their hours.”
Even here in the Northeast USA we’re expecting an extended heat wave with THI in the 3 digits.
It’s all over the world.
Sorry to be a drag on Dennis-Tuesday and thank you for the reminder. In addition to sunscreen, I also recommend a skin-check with a dermatologist twice a year.
Skin is the human body’s largest organ; don’t end up like that Camaro.
This isn’t being a drag; This is stating facts. It is disconcerting, to say the least. I remember working outside as a landscaper / greenskeeper in southwestern Florida, and I remember hot days and all of us making sure we all had our water coolers with us.
Temps in the Tampa Bay area haven’t been too far behind Arizona recently, but with our trademark humidity one almost feels like you’re already in the pool, dripping wet as soon as your air conditioned dermis hits the outside air. It’s a bit like bringing a cold glass of water from inside to the outside air- you just start dripping with “condensation”. This is the first Summer since 2020 that my office has been back to regular business casual garb, having loosened up to allowing shorts and polo shirts during the pandemic years while clients weren’t permitted to just walk in unannounced. Putting on khakis and oxford shirts recently has made me wish I’d opted for WFH, but I’ve been an office mouse for 30 years and I prefer to be in the thick of it- most days.
My mother briefly considered a Berlinetta in ’79, but opted for a Horizon TC3, ostensibly because of the Camaro’s nearly unusable rear seat and very shallow trunk. It still amazes me that with 3 boys my family never owned a 4-door car until I was in college and my next youngest brother was already driving. I remember really wishing she’d picked that navy blue Berlinetta with the tan interior, but of course as the oldest I would have staked my claim on the shotgun seat, so of course. Truthfully, the TC3 was the more practical choice, with better economy, a rear seat that could actually provide seating for 3 in a pinch, front wheel drive for snowy days and a hatchback that could swallow a weeks worth of groceries. But from today’s perspective to call either of the two “practical” is funny when considering we were a family of 5. Dad still drove the ’77 Monte Carlo before upgrading to a new ’80 Toronado, but still- 2 doors, not exactly stellar space utilization- Different times.
Many great points to ponder here. One thing I don’t miss about working in the Tampa Bay area was walking out of my apartment to get to my car and already being sweaty. And then blasting the a/c to cool off, which then dried my perspiration on my body, which somehow felt doubly funky.
It wasn’t until the mid- / late-’80s that I started noticing more family cars being four-doors. My family of origin made due with two doors for most of my lifetime up to a point, when we got an ’84 Ford Tempo sedan. I don’t remember it feeling particularly cramped or cumbersome to get into the back seat of my parents’ Plymouth Volare or Duster, but then again, I wasn’t an adult.
The navy blue ’79 Berlinetta with the turbine fin wheels and the chamois interior and pinstripe is striking. To this day, I would love one of those. They picked the correct configuration of that car for the ad / brochure.
Oh my this is the exact color of my 79 Berlinetta. Different wheels however. And that single gnarly exhaust pipe gives away the v6, thankfully I had the 305 in all its glory. I really loved that car but sadly lost it in a huge accident, my fourth in that car.
I wondered about the exhausts! From the direct rear shot, I thought I had seen two tailpipes, but I’m sure I could have been mistaken. I’m glad yours kept you protected enough after those wrecks.
They say that the advantage of owning a car in a desert climate is that they don’t rust. But whenever I see a specimen like this Camaro, I have to wonder if rust is really that much worse a fate than being toasted like this. Maybe toasting can be rescued by a paint job…but odds are that the interior of this car looks about as bad as the exterior and cannot be fixed with paint. I suppose that if I had to live in AZ, I’d have to have a white car. At least the outside wouldn’t look this bad.
On the upside for the Camaro, it obviously still has brakes and/or a transmission. I was looking hard to see whether the rear wheels were chocked (indicating a roller-only), but it does look like this one may still be driving.
Most cars you’ll see down there have a carpeted pad to keep the UV rays from splitting the dash. Past that, generally, interiors hold up just fine.
As for the paint, please keep in mind this is original, Malaise era GM, 40-year-old paint on this specimen. Again, most newer cars are just fine.
Jeff, I agree, UV can damage parts that you wouldn’t think of like heat damage to the adhesive holding up the headliner etc. I read in Car & Driver back in the 80’s, a comment from a foreign car journalist that the US was the only country he’d seen where people have their garages filled with useless junk and leave cars worth thousands of dollars sit outside.
Well, I know such garages in at least one European country, too.
It is a lot cheaper and less labor intensive to restore an interior than it is to properly repair a rusted unibody. Barring a bad accident serious rust is the only thing I believe makes a car “too far gone”.
Jeff, great observations. The car was in the driveway when my friends and I went to the pool party, and it was still there when we left, but the license plate looked current and if I had to guess, I think the car ran and drove.
I’m pretty sure those GM plastics from the ’70s would mean the interior of this one is pretty crumbly in that desert sun. It’s a toss-up between having to deal with that kind of interior or body rust, in terms of which I’d consider worse.
I wonder when someone put real wire wheels on it.
Do they air condition garages in Arizona?
Having had 3 different types of skin cancer and countless pre-cancerous patches frozen or cut off, I avoid going outside when the powers of UV are exalted. After 10 am, it’s usually too miserable here 4 months of the year anyway. I just wish the heat would dissipate sooner in the evenings as it does in the desert.
I wonder when someone put real wire wheels on it.
Those are the standard wire wheel covers that came on the Berlinetta. Check out the brochure shot. Here’s one below:
I saw the brochure pic. It’s a damn fine fake–better than Cadillac’s of the time, and better in real life than the brochure.
I agree that these wire wheel covers are a cut above many from that era. For me, though, the cast aluminum wheels from ’79 are so darn near perfect-looking to my taste that I consider these wire covers a significant downgrade. I do like that the center caps have the Berlinetta script in them.
Sorry for the bad pun, but is that the Chevy “Burnlinetta”? I just couldn’t resist……lol
You said “Burnlinetta”, I said “Burnt-linetta” – we had the same basic pun. Haha!
The sun was never much of a friend to the soft lacquer paints that GM used for so many years, and those finishes tended to look weathered sooner than the hard enamels used other manufacturers.
Someday I may be able to disassociate the Camaro Berlinetta from the “Valley Girl” voice of the sorority girl in a college class as she told friends about the new car she had received as a gift from her family. But today is not that day.
The model/nameplate mix of Camaros over the years was always confusing to me. But I guess Berlinetta was more imaginative than Camaro Brougham.
Think the “Berlinetta” name was borrowed. The top of the line Opel Manta (Opel 1900) had been called “Berlinetta” from 1973 on. And yes – with its vinyl roof, chromed rim rings, elegant velours upholstery and mainly dark body colours – those Mantas had a slight broughamy touch.
What’s interesting was that the luxury version of the 1900 / Manta that we got in the U.S. was called the “Luxus”, but that was Buick’s temporary name for their high-line models. “Manta Berlinetta” does have a ring to it, but in my mind, Berlinetta could mean only one car, and that’s a Camaro.
This inspired me to re-listen to “Everybody’s Free To Wear Sunscreen” by Baz Luhrmann, mostly known as film director. Thanks Joseph.
And now I’m also listening to it. That’s how these things work sometimes.
Not too far gone IMO .
I’ve never driven a newer than 1968 Camaro, I wonder how these were with the V6 engine .
I imagine the Buick V6 is easily hopped up in non smog test areas, non ? .
Since all the white folks here are wondering but afraid to ask, I’ll cover the sun burn and black folks Q. & A. :
Q. : “Do you get sunburn like us ?” .
A. 1 : “of course stupid !”
A. 2 :” of course not stupid !” .
You’re welcome .
-Nate
Haha! Awesome. And yes, thank you.
I’ve been listening ti it both ways for 50 + years now…..
Just like white folks, : some burn some don’t .
I’m Scots / Irish so I burn really easily .
Fair of skin, hair and eyes, Moms had terrible facial melanoma and spent several years looking like a cast member in a Wes Craven movie .
-Nate
My mom is of German and Scots-Irish descent and she can’t even look at daylight without burning. Things I’ve learned not to take for granted with my own complexion.
I can dig it .
As a child I had to always wear a T-Shirt when going to the beach, when I moved to New Hampshire in 1967 I foolishly went without and got serious burns across my shoulders that still show scars today .
-Nate
Having lived in Phoenix these past 35 years. I am quite familiar with the ravages of the sun, in particular, UV rays. Have seen paint in various stages of decay. The old single stage paints hold up well if waxed regularly. Sometimes a good buffing is needed. Darker colors do suffer, but I see a lot of flat white and peeling white. Clear coats turn cancerous and look like hoar frost if not waxed regularly as well. A regular buff and wax is as important to a
vehicle finish as a good sunscreen is to our skin. Seems a lot of folks here really do treat cars as appliances. you can tell a gearhead by the condition of his vehicles paint. (though I know of several exceptions to that rule)
Excellent points about maintenance. This makes me think I might have texted my friends to ask what their maintenance routine looks like for their cars, even if they garage them.
My first experience with very hot and dry air was a visit to see my aunt in Walnut Creek California in 1974. It really is true Joseph. You actually feel briefly chilly when you get out of the pool in that dry desert air, even at 104 degrees in the sun.
This was a big difference from that other city by the bay on the other side of the country where I live. In Baltimore, we are very lucky to get a low humidity day once July and August are here. It’s like the freakin’ Bahamas around here!
As a CC effect, my wife and I were literally just having this conversation, as we would like to change the airmass in our house. Not today with a temperature just over 80, but a real feel closer to 90. Evaporative cooling is NOT happening today!
The best part about A/C is the dry air it creates .
Yesterday it was 104* F in the shade here so I spent most of the afternoon inside my crappy little house of 1,158 square feet with a flat roof .
I have a ‘portable A/C unit’ that helps quite a bit ~ mostly it cools the bathroom like a meat locker but combined with the 21″ exhaust box fan on my Service Porch it helps circulate the dryer air around so it never exceeded 82* F inside, this is a great improvement over before when my ex wife insisted on opening all the windows and the heat radiated down through the un insulated flat roof causing the inside temps to reach 120* F and occasionally more .
Swamp coolers are good in the Desert but not in typical Urban areas where there’s more humidity .
-Nate
That whole phenomenon of 100-degrees F feeling cool when I got out of the pool blew my mind. And of course my friends wanted to bring my attention to it by asking me to look at the thermometer so I could appreciate what was happening. I got a science lesson on Fourth Of July weekend of this year.
I’ve lived in Tucson for my whole life (born in 1953), so we’re just a couple of degrees cooler than Phoenix. (The difference is just enough that we can get frost in the winter while Phoenix doesn’t.) Evaporative coolers seem to work better in Tucson than in Phoenix; the air is a bit drier here. (For the first part of our summer, starting in April and going into late June/early July, we use our cooler, and the house is a comfortable 75 or even cooler. When the humidity starts to climb and the cooler isn’t working so well, we switch to the A/C for the rest of the summer.) With all of that, our summer this year seems hotter than ever.
When I was a kid, it seemed like whatever car we had had chalked paint and badly deteriorating upholstery. We had lots of shops that specialized in custom-fitted seat covers. Other people’s cars fared no better. For several years we had a ’52 Cadillac Series 62 sedan. It had seat covers, but the black paint hadn’t chalked. Instead, there were lots of fine cracks in the finish, typical of GM’s lacquers as they aged. In the ’70s, GM’s products seemed to age particularly poorly. I remember seeing so many mid-sized GM cars in particular with fading metallic paint, disintegrating window seals, and adhesive oozing out from around rear windows and trim strips on the sides of the cars. This was happening to cars only a few years old.
In the late ’70s I acquired a ’70 Ford Torino Brougham that had good paint that remained good the several years I had the car. But the black vinyl top was developing cracks, so I had the top replaced with white vinyl. (That made a difference in the temperature inside the car and the factory A/C worked even better.) The upholstery, though, was beginning to deteriorate, so I had seat covers put on. The padded dash had cracked, too.
These days, paint seems to hold up much better as long as the clearcoat remains intact. Dashboards and upholstery seem to hold up far better these days, too. It doesn’t hurt having a garage; that’s the ultimate protection, even if it gets really hot in the summer.
Thank you for this, David. With your mention of GM and Ford products (of different time periods, granted), it now makes me think of a poll topic: which of the Detroit Four had the best quality paint in the 1970s?
Seat covers hadn’t even occurred to me as a protective measure. I also seem to recall many more cars of the ’70s having vinyl interior versus more ’80s cars having cloth seats, with my assumption that the latter would wear better and fade worse.
And it’s 66 degrees and drizzling here in Eugene this morning, although that is a bit uncommon at this time of year.
I’m almost completely unfamiliar with what a summer in your corner of the continental U.S. would be like, but 66 F seems unusually cool for late July. I’d have all my windows open at 66F if it wasn’t too humid.
As a 35-year resident of the DFW area, I have never acclimated to our long, hot and humid summers. Sometimes, prevailing winds bring Gulf Coast humidity, causing the temperature-humidity index to yield “feels like” temps exceeding 110 degrees Fahrenheit, as they did in June this year. More typically, drier air sets in by early July through much of September and temps hit the high 90s to low 100s for weeks at a time, with only brief, violent storms providing any relief.
I have seen more than my share of cars afflicted with faded paint here (but little rust), especially those painted silver, light metallic blue and any shade of red, which turns chalky. More so, it seems that the harsh summer climate takes quite toll on rubber gaskets, weatherstripping, and plastics of all types. My German-made cars seem less durable than my Hondas or domestic vehicles in this count, with virtually all suffering a surfeit of wind and water leaks as they age and things like instrument panel control knobs breaking over time.
A good college friend inherited a two-year old Berlinetta from an aunt. His was a copper color with a tan cloth interior and I was actually quite impressed with the fit and finish. I know his car had a V8, as the dual exhaust pipes rusted out in less than four years and were expensive to replace on a student’s budget. In all, while he might have preferred a Z28 or Rally Sport, he like his car and got good service from it, keeping it all the way through law school.
A copper Berlinetta with a tan interior would have been such a sharp car for anyone, let alone a college student. My heuristic has always been that silver and gold metallic paint colors are the first to oxidize and look bad, but thinking about the prevalence of silver as a popular color on modern cars, someone must have perfected the formula.
May be the secret is, that today most paint colours are clearcoated – “shiny and sheltered”.
Same here, but in Austin, for 40 years so far.
I’ve had only VWs for cars (since 1981), brought my Scirocco from New England when I moved here, it lacked air conditioning and because traffic wasn’t too bad back then, I could count on windows down and mostly movement till I got my ’86 Golf and finally got AC. The paint on the Scirocco (Champagne Edition, kind of a tan) faded within 6 months of moving here. The GTi that replaced it eventually needed new weatherstripping, but that model had a long rubber piece that went up the A pillar and went all the way back to the hatch that the weatherstripping was part of and all the cars in the salvage yard had pieces worse than mine, so I had to send away to a northern salvage yard for a new piece. My current car is a silver 2000 Golf, which overall has pretty good paint (I put wax on it twice a year and it is parked part time in a garage) except over the plastic/rubber parts where it is fading (door handles, bumper, rearview mirrors). The sun is really strong and causes lots of damage…when I lived up north people would brag about southern cars, but only because fewer have rusted, of course burnt paint can rust underneath and southern cars usually have faded interiors and cracked dash tops, and as you mention, plastic and rubber pieces quickly disintegrate in the sun.
As far as the Berlinetta, don’t have much experience except my Brother-in-Law had a ’76 or so Camaro LT before this model was offered, I drove it once when we took him out the night before he married my sister (in 1980). His had the 350, and I remember the clutch and gearshift felt stiff like a truck (I was used to VW). He even told me in his inebriated state that I should upshift sooner. He has had way more cars than I, probably close to 50, whereas I’ve only had 5 in almost 50 years of driving. He and my sister’s family also eventually moved to Texas after his Dad passed away but they’ve been here close to 20 years now.
I’ve lived in Las Vegas for 16 years now, following 20 years in Michigan. I will happily endure 110F so that I never have to endure 10F ever again. I’ll take burnt paint and a crusty interior over a rustbucket any day of the week.
I’ve never had to brush the sunshine off my car in order to get to work. I don’t have to shovel heat off my sidewalk to prevent slipping and falling.
My Phoenix friends are also originally from the Midwest (he’s from Chicago; She’s from near Indianapolis), and they both expressed basically the same logic as you. They’ll handle three-digit temps over freezing cold for as long as they have a choice.
“Brush the sunshine…” LOL, but totally solid. Love that.
That looks nice!
As I read this it’s the second frost of winter, and a bracing 3C outside. I can hear builders working over the road, and shudder. I’m glad it’s them out there and not me! I haven’t been outside to let the chooks and ducks out yet, waiting for it to warm up some before I attempt the trek to the orchard. And here you speak of sunburn and summer. 🙂 Lovely.
AFAIK I’m totally Caucasian, but my skin has a reddish tinge which deepens in summer. I tend to stay inside, not liking the heat much. More of a concern for me is the solar keratosis on my face, which results in an appearance somewhat similar to this.
How nice it is to see an unmolested Camaro, one that is neither a Z28 nor a Z28 clone. Long may it remain so. And how fascinating to see its size relative to new cars; it’s not as big as I thought.
I can always appreciate the reminder from my friends in the southern hemisphere that our seasons are the “reverse” of theirs! It also did occur to me, looking at the final shot of the Camaro in the driveway in front of that black Mazda (?) just how much small it looks relative to the cars around it. I always remembered those second-generation F-bodies as always seeming of substantial heft.
Ugh. My father lived in Surprise AZ from 2000-11 and I wouldn’t visit in the summer if I could avoid it. Stay indoors all day during the summer is not for me. Things seem much worse as the temps have been hitting 114F lately. Of course the Bay Area, really mean inland like Walnut Creek and Concord have seen a few 100-104 days. Ugh, because I really do not like it above 85F. Office has A/C as does home but try not to use it at home and with the trees around the house it might hit 86F inside. Once above 85 the A/C goes on but I can handle lower or go to Alameda where the temp is around 25 degrees lower 30 miles away.
I just like that there’s a place in Arizona called “Surprise”. Of course, I had to look this up, and this is from Wikipedia:
“The city was founded in 1938 by Flora Mae Statler, who named it Surprise as she ‘would be surprised if the town ever amounted to much’.”
One hundred fourteen degrees. Wow.
If we want to get into horrible paint jobs, the Honda dark colors of the late nineties through 2006 or so experienced some horrible clear coat peel on the top surfaces. It didn’t take long to happen, maybe only 5 or 6 years. And this is In Massachusetts not exactly the desert.
This, and I have always thought of Honda as the attention-to-quality brand.
The trick is to find a used car that was garaged most of it’s life, buy it, and then intercede to maintain and protect the existing finish. If I couldn’t garage a car I’d keep it under a car cover when it was parked at home. This works best for a hobby car that doesn’t get driven everyday. I didn’t carry the cover around and cover the car away from home, but I used those windshield screens anytime it was going to be parked outside for more than a few minutes.
The sun’s UV rays and the heat will damage and fade the interior plastics. Wash, wax and protect. Remove environmental contaminants (bird strikes) as soon as possible. Everyone’s got extra fast food napkins and bottled water in their cars. In my area most new cars will retain their looks for maybe 10 years with little maintenance.
This fussiness may strike your Wife, partner, family or friends, as somewhat excessive, but they’ll get used to it. Anyway, it’s your car.