Here’s Why the 1996 Chevy Impala SS Was Really Cool

this is a 1996 chevy impala ss and it's one of my very favorite 1990s cars from general motors that's not saying all that much because general motors went through a bit of a rough patch in the 90s but this was undoubtedly a shining star and today i'm going to review this pristine 96 impala ss and i'm going to show you what i mean [Music] i've borrowed this car from a viewer here in southern california and i'm going to start with a little history the chevy impala first came out in the 1950s and the ss or super sport model quickly became the one to have the top of the line trim level with the highest performance unfortunately as the 1970s and 80s took hold tightening emissions regulations basically killed off fun cars with big engines and the impala ss died and then the impala died all together after the 1985 model year but then 10 years later chevy brought it back in 1994 they debuted the impala ss as the high performance version of the chevy caprice which was chevy's full-size sedan at the time and by 1990 standards the impala ss was really cool power came from a 5.7 liter v8 that was basically the same engine in the chevy corvette at the time long before there was ever a cadillac cts-v where that sort of thing became common horsepower was rated at only 260 but torque was a healthy 330 pound feet and all impala ss models from this era were rear-wheel drive with an automatic transmission unfortunately the impala ss didn't last long chevy sold it from 1994 to 96 only three model years and then they canceled the caprice which meant the impala ss went away also eventually it came back but it was front wheel drive and it was never the same this was the last really cool chevy impala ss and today i'm going to review it first i'm going to take you on a tour of this car and show you all of its interesting quirks and features then i'm going to get it out on the road and drive it and then i'm going to give it a dug score all right i'm going to start the quirks and features of this impala ss with getting in now this car is unbelievably pristine original mint with one modification this remote these didn't come with remotes from the factory but this one had a remote added in the 90s and it makes this wonderfully 90s sound now i'd bring that up because so many aftermarket car remote systems in the 90s made that sound but i haven't heard that sound in like 10 years and yet here it is i prefer to discuss things on a car that were put there by the factory but i thought this aftermarket remote was worth mentioning because that sound is a relic of this era now one other reason to mention the remote is because i want to cover why the original owner probably had it installed when he first bought the car in 96. these were very desirable especially to steel and especially here in southern california they were big they could carry a lot of people and they were fast and you could really have a fun joy ride with all your friends if you stole one of these being a 90s gm car it wasn't that difficult to steal so that's probably why the original owner installed the alarm system and next up moving on to getting into the impala one thing i noticed instantly when i tried to climb in is that the door opening is just not all that wide it's kind of hard to show this on camera but this is as far as the door opens and it's just unusually narrow especially because this car was based on the chevy caprice which was a common police vehicle and police officers are usually wearing belts with all sorts of equipment like guns and night sticks and flashlights and speaking of the caprice it's worth noting that even though the impala ss was the high performance version it was still based on the caprice which was a fairly tame full-size sedan mainly aimed at old people government fleets and rental car companies and so there are a lot of caprice remnants throughout this car for instance on the door panel all of the controls are oversized which is exactly what you'd expect for a car whose target market is mainly the elderly you can see the controls for basically everything here are big with large print font to describe what everything does the door locks the mirror control all very large with large readable font even if your eyesight is starting to go you also have the power seat controls here you can see on the door panel a couple of switches to tilt the seat and then one larger switch in the middle to kind of move it up and down and around and so that's where all the large controls were and speaking of remnants of the more pedestrian chevy caprice climbing inside the car i want to turn your attention to the steering wheel which is really not very performancy this is a dull old-school grandma car steering wheel interestingly i think general motors used this wheel on the corvette and the camaro from this time period as well it was a different era when they really didn't want to be bothered to make different steering wheels for their performance cars so they just put this in a lot of different stuff and next up another not so performancy item in this car is the gauges you take a look at them and they just look like standard general motors gauges like you might find in a rental car surprisingly these are actually the gauges you want in the 94 and 95 impala ss models there was a digital gauge cluster which looked cool but then you didn't get a tachometer only in 96 did they go to these analog gauges and then they give you the tack so this is the more desirable gauge cluster and speaking of the gauge cluster another interesting item in there is the fuel gauge this car was just filled with fuel and as you can see it was really filled with fuel when it's reading full it is far beyond the actual markings of this gauge this is general motors quality in the 1990s now with that said there are some performance items inside this car one of them is front bucket seats a lot of the caprice models from this era had a big cloth bench seat going across the front but the 96 ss has dual front bucket seats individual seats like you'd expect from a sportier car and on the headrest the seats say ss which looks really cool and kind of enhances your performance car credibility when your passengers look at your super sport headrests and speaking of badging i want to turn your attention to the middle of the interior in the center console where you have this logo with like a leaping antelope thing you might be thinking what is that that is an impala which is actually like an antelope type creature that lives in africa and that was historically a logo that chevy would use on its impala models so they brought it back for this one when they revived the impala ss in 94. now that's important to mention because that logo is the primary emblem that appears basically everywhere on the car in fact the chevrolet logo appears on the outside of the car in only one place the front grille otherwise you have that impala logo on the c pillar in the back you have it on the wheels and the center caps and you have it on the very back in the center of the trunk all of the exterior logos are jumping impalas instead of chevrolet and in fact in this interior there's no chevrolet logo either the only chevy logo you have is this tiny one on the steering wheel off center you would barely ever notice it instead they committed to going full impala for this car but anyway back to some of the other performance car credentials here another one is the floor shifter even though these were all automatics it was considered cooler to have a shifter on the floor now the 94 and 95 impala ss models didn't they had column shifters but the 96 had the floor shifter like the cool performance car that it was now speaking of that shifter one of the biggest problems with the impala ss models from this era was the transmission it just wasn't designed to handle the extra power and torque that this car had over the caprice so a lot of these were sidelined with transmission failure and in some cases there have even been manual swaps when the transmission goes and people are looking for something a little more enjoyable to drive by the way one item i find amusing on the floor shifter you can see at the very top there's a label printed that says apply break to shift from park they put that on there to court the i've never driven a car before demographic of course that's what you do everyone knows that you don't need to print it there but they did anyway and next up another interesting item in the impala ss you open up the glove box and you can see a circular yellow button in there that opens the trunk and the reason it's in the glove box is so that if you give this car to a valet you can lock the glove box with the master key give the valet the valet key and then the valet won't have access to your trunk that was the thinking now one other lovely item in the glove box is the owner's manual and i particularly like the timeline of chevrolet within the first few pages it starts out in the 19-teens with the earliest chevrolets and then it moves on to the 30s and the 50s the corvette and the 60s and then it skips all the way to this car in 1994. i love this they skipped over the entire 70s and 80s it's like an admission from chevrolet that they built two decades worth of crap and nothing in there is worthy of being put in the owner's manual timeline and next up we move on to the back seat in the impala ss which is large but not that large i actually had to move up the front seat in order to get back here this car is huge but the interior is not huge it's really an unusual use of space but anyway we're in the back seat and one of the first things you notice is another leaping impala logo right here in the middle another reminder of exactly what we're sitting in one other thing i love back here is on the door panel and turn your attention to the window switch which appears to be mounted kind of randomly just in the middle of a big piece of plastic in the door panel not sure why they chose that exact spot but anyway i like the fact that it tells you up and down written as up and down you can see they have a lot of room to write out the word down which by the way is only four letters but they chose didn't instead they decided to abbreviate it another great example of 90s general motors quality one other interesting item back here is behind the rear seats and that would be this massive rear shelf this is one of the largest you will ever see you could put like children in this thing if you decided to far bigger than the rear shelf behind the seats in basically any other car but it isn't just that rear shelf that's huge back here it's everything one thing that always stood out to me about this car was just how much car you had after the back wheel there's like four additional feet of impala ss back here this was pretty common in the 70s especially with full-sized cars like this one these giant overhangs in the front and in the back but the practice had pretty much died off by the 90s and yet the chevy caprice which the impala ss was based on was kind of an old-school full-size sedan so it still had these overhangs and that meant the impala ss had them too but the benefit of that big rear overhang was that you got a big trunk for decades in america one of the measurements of how large and luxurious your car was was how big your trunk was and the impala ss certainly carried that philosophy into the 90s so you have a massive trunk back here that you could proudly show off to people but it came at the expense of rear seat room all of this space was behind the rear wheels to give you a big trunk instead of in front of the rear wheels to give you a larger back seat so the back seat was pretty small as i already showed you and of course the other thing i find funny back here is the spare tire which takes up a huge amount of trunk it was almost like chevy was saying we'll give you a huge trunk but then we're gonna take back about a third of it for the spare tire at least it's carpeted to make it look a little nicer and next up we move under the hood in the impala ss and you can see this car's 5.7 liter v8 this was the lt1 v8 and like i mentioned earlier this was pretty much the same engine in the corvette from this era now there were some differences for example the corvette had aluminum heads this one had cast iron there were some other changes too but they were pretty much the same powertrain which was a huge deal by modern standards it's not really all that much to talk about but when this car came out there was no hellcat there was no cts-v there was no amg and putting a corvette engine in a sedan was a huge thing this car was considered really special as a result now as you can see up here this car has a massive engine bay there's actually several feet in front of the engine that aren't used at all and you can see straight through to the ground you could put a much bigger engine in here and in fact when the impala ss came out as a concept car in 1992 it had an 8.2 liter v8 unfortunately that was killed for production and you got this 5.7 liter v8 with about 260 horsepower and 330 pound-feet of torque not huge numbers by modern standards but pretty healthy for the mid-90s and when it came to upgrades to change the caprice into the impala ss you got more than just the engine for one thing the ss was basically a caprice with the police package and that meant that you got improved stronger suspension and additional cooling equipment and better brakes for heavier duty driving but it went beyond that the impala ss also had a lowered ride height like an inch or two lower than a standard caprice and you had a limited slip differential standard in every impala ss which is pretty cool and all the impala ss models got a dual exhaust in the back which gave them an especially bold and muscular look there weren't too many sedans back then with a dual exhaust the other exterior item that was different was the wheels the impala ss models had these kind of unusual very distinctive wheels that only ever went on the impala ss they never put them on the caprice or any other chevrolet model from this era and since we're talking exterior details a couple of interesting quirks i noticed one is that when you put on the turn signal in front you can see a little light also turns on along with the turn signal this is called the cornering light and the thought was that if you were signaling to the left for example you are going to be going to the left so you might want to see a little bit better to the left so it would put on a light in the direction that you were signaling to illuminate your path over there which is actually a pretty good idea that's been integrated into some modern luxury cars like 15 years after general motors and some other brands had it in the 70s 80s 90s and one other exterior item worth noting compared to the caprice all the impala ss models had a rear spoiler although it is a very very small rear spoiler not really noticeable certainly not functional but it added a little bit of sportiness to the car on the rear fenders you also have impala ss badging this was body color not raised very far again pretty subtle but if you knew what to look for you knew it was there and finally a couple of other impala ss facts because i'm kind of a geek about this car one is that when this car came out for the 94 model year it was only offered in black now in 95 they expanded the color choices to a dark red which they called cherry and then a green also but black is the color i remember seeing these things driving around when i was a kid and everybody knew you had to have black now one other interesting year to your item there are two ways to tell apart the 94 models from 95 and 96 impala ss's one is the mirrors on the 94 model the mirror was mounted a little lower on the door whereas on the later cars it was mounted higher up sort of at the base of the side windows the other way to tell apart the 94 models is very unusual and the c pillar you can see the window kind of kinks forward to allow space for this impala badge on the 94 models that kink was in place but the window actually continued behind it all the way down to sort of the side line of the car to make a triangle and then chevrolet installed a little panel over the window to make it look like the window kinked forward it was very strange for 95 and 96 they just changed the body stamping to actually make the window kink forward so they didn't have to put that little panel on there now through the three-year production run of this car they're about 70 000 units made which is a pretty strong number and these were even exported to the middle east and sold as the chevy caprice ss because impala didn't have the history there that it does here in the states as a result these aren't particularly rare but they are rare in nice condition like i mentioned a lot of transmissions died when these things were cheap people didn't bother replacing them a lot of these were modified crashed driven too hard stolen so finding a nice one is really really hard these are starting to get into the 15 to 25 to 30 000 range in nice shape one other interesting exterior detail if you look on the rear fenders you will notice that you don't see a fuel door back here so you may be wondering how do you get fuel in this thing the answer is you go to the license plate you pull it down and that's where the gas cap is and that's where you put fuel in now this was pretty common practice in the 50s 60s 70s kind of the old era of cars but it was completely gone by 96 and i'm not sure about this but i wouldn't be at all surprised to learn that the 96 impala ss and the caprice were some of the very last cars that had their gas cap under a full down license plate and so those are the quirks and features of the 1996 chevy impala ss now it's time to do something i've wanted to since i was a kid i'm going to get this thing out on the road and see how it drives all right driving the 96 impala ss i've actually been driving this car around for a little while now and i gotta say the first thing you notice is not that it's fast or cool or special it's that it's huge the overhangs are very noticeable because there's weight on both sides of them so you feel like you're driving a small car with like extra weight hanging out in front and behind now unfortunately this car didn't have that much sound from the factory it just wasn't a common thing back in the 90s to give cars a really deep exhaust that was something you just did in the aftermarket one thing i am surprised about the ride is relatively rough in this car you see a big 90s american sedan and you think the ride is gonna feel pretty plush and comfy not in this case the ride is rougher than you think i believe because of the sport suspension with that said i am surprised by the steering in this car um on center it's not good at all in fact you can see i'm moving in and not much really happens with the car but as you start to get into the turn the steering is actually pretty quick and the car does what it's supposed to um the handling is not as good there's body roll and the car is big and you can feel it being big and kind of moving but the steering is surprisingly precise and surprisingly quick uh not what i was expecting for a car like this there was clearly some effort put in to really making this more of a performance car than just throwing on a little extra horsepower and a slightly different appearance all right i'm going to floor to here sean accelerates wow wow actually pretty quick i'm surprised by that the 0-60 time published at the time was about seven and a half seconds low to mid sevens and that was actually pretty good for then especially in a sedan you just didn't get that many powerful sedans back at that time um and it still feels relatively fast now one key competitor to this car was the ford taurus sho they were different size classes and the impala was a little bit more expensive but the idea was similar take a fairly standard american sedan and make a performance car out of it and this was quicker than the taurus this is actually the first time i have ever driven one of these and i have to say i'm impressed with it in a couple of ways i didn't expect to be the steering is definitely sharper than i was expecting that it would be given the size of the car and the fact that it came out a 90s gm who was kind of mailing it in for everything it is also quicker than i thought it would be it accelerates quicker than you'd think given that power rating of only 260 which is just not that strong of a number one other thing i always felt about this car was that i think it's kind of the spiritual successor to the buick grand national it was general motors you take a fairly standard car from that era that was big wasn't intended to be sporty and you do what's necessary and of course they're both black i mean you could get these in different colors and there were versions of the gn that came in different colors but black was the color for both of them and they were both kind of like not that sporty by modern standards but you respect them for what they did at the time one thing about this particular car is it's in fantastic shape uh and i truly mean i've never seen anything like this before i mean 90s cars don't look this good a lot of these weren't preserved a lot of them weren't kept up there was a time when they got really cheap people modded them they didn't care about them and now finding a nice one is getting really challenging especially a nice black one from 96 which is the final model year debatable but generally agreed to be the best year although it is the most common and so that's the 1996 chevy impala ss this car isn't really all that fast or particularly exciting by modern standards but it was a bright spot in the doldrums that was the 1990s general motors lineup and it looks cool and it's special and i'm thrilled that i had the chance to check this one out and now it's time to give the impala ss a doug score starting with the weekend categories and styling in my opinion the impala ss is really cool looking just the big body sedan in black lowered it's sinister and it gets a 7 out of 10. acceleration 0 to 60 is over 7 seconds so it gets a 1 out of 10. handling is ok not great no surprise given its size and it gets a 4 out of 10. fun factors same deal it's sort of fast and sort of sporty but not excessively either and it gets a 4 out of 10. cool factor is higher these are special though they're not too rare and it gets a 6 out of 10 for a total weekend score of 22 out of 50. next up are the daily categories and features the impala ss doesn't have much by modern standards and it gets a 2 out of 10. comfort is fine and it gets a 6 out of 10. quality is only ok the interior isn't especially high quality and reliability is a known weak point for these with the transmission failure though parts are cheap and easy to come by still it gets a 5 out of 10. practicality is average for a car like this and it gets a 5 out of 10. finally value and i personally think these are undervalued the nicest one in the world is probably worth 30 grand and you can pick up a really nice one for 15 to 20 and they're just cooler than that number suggests i think large production volume is the culprit but it's still a good price for something so relatively special and it gets a 7 out of 10 for a total daily score of 25 out of 50. added up in the doug score is 47 out of 100 which places the impala ss here against some other sort of similar cars although i haven't reviewed anything directly in competition the impala loses out to the grand national the chevy has a higher daily score but the buick is just a little more exciting and special but still the 96 impala ss is a legend [Music]

Channel: Doug DeMuro

Views: 1,949,646

Keywords: chevy impala ss, impala ss, chevy impala ss review, impala ss review, 1996 impala ss, 1996 impala ss review, 96 impala ss, ss, chevy ss review, impala review, 96 impala, doug demuro, demuro, doug de muro

Id: HQjPk1tpxoE

Length: 25min 37sec (1537 seconds)

Published: Thu Apr 23 2020