Chevrolet Camaro Convertible Concept

Of course! A convertible! It's as obvious as the response General Motors expected last year when it posed the question, "Should we build a new Camaro?" in three glorious, 1:1-scale Detroit-show dimensions.

Look at the Camaro coupe concept's top, or the original 1969 Camaro to which it pays homage, and you'll see it's easy to slice it off without compensating for too fast a fastback. It's easy if you picture it or photoshop it as we did months ago. It wasn't as easy for Tom Peters, director of rear-drive design and chief of design for the Camaro convertible, last year's coupe, and, not coincidentally, for the C6 Corvette.

"It's amazing how many people think that's all you do," Peters says. "Probably every surface is changed, say, two or three inches down from the door-cut back all around. Even the spoiler looks like the one on the coupe, but it's not."

Rear fenderlines drop off from the horizontal surface to the vertical surface a couple inches farther out than on the coupe to keep proportions good. If showing a Camaro convertible concept at the 2007 Detroit show seems obvious, that's only from your armchair.

It may not be so obvious as it is necessary. Chevy will launch the Camaro coupe in late 2008 as a 2009 model; then to battle the other Ford Mustang body style, it'll launch the Camaro convertible about spring of 2009. We're still awaiting official word from Chrysler on a ragtop version of the 2009 Dodge Challenger, but that's another no-brainer.

"The overall car statement is," Peters says, "whereas the last one was pure, design-statement, performance-oriented, this one has more of a fun, sporty, kind of personality to it. And that's appropriate. That's what Camaro's been in the past; that's what these types of cars have been in the past. Sporty, fun, and all the way to the serious performance."

As the concept makes the rounds of car shows following its Detroit debut, GM Australia is hard at work on the production car. Expect thicker sills and tunnels and added cross-bracing to give the convertible's unibody coupelike stiffness.

Doing another Camaro concept also gave Peters's crew the chance to work on different colors and textures. The convertible concept has charcoal SS stripes over a lustrous Hugger orange paint job-the stripes are so dark they appear black under certain light. You might think of the 1969 Camaro RS/SS Indy 500 official pace car, which has orange stripes on a white body.