Muscle cars they are designed to make the driver feel like the king of the road, leaving faces of joy and disgust in their wake as you drive. Some muscle cars achieve this through gorgeous design details, others through speed or engine note. Above all, muscle cars are designed to be cool for both the owner and the spectator.
Sometimes, however, muscle cars fall short of this design goal. Some muscle cars have great designs, but get such fake engine notes that they become unlivable and are as guilty of noise pollution as a small rock festival. Then we have the muscle cars that are perfectly serviceable as vehicles, but are incredibly poorly designed and leave you questioning whether the people who signed them off had 20/20 vision.
So we’ve compiled this list of 10 muscle cars that were too loud and obnoxious. These aren’t necessarily bad cars, but they’re certainly ones you’d think twice about driving through a built-up area.
10 2013 Ford Mustang Shelby GT500
Any Mustang that has the Shelby nameplate bolted on is sure to provide dust-pounding thrills and an incredibly loud exhaust note. The 2013 GT500 was the last Shelby Mustang with a live axle, and quite possibly the wildest.
With an impressive spec sheet that includes a 0-60 time of 3.5 seconds, a top speed of 200 mph, and a supercharged 5.8-liter V8 capable of 662 horsepower, this Mustang was a surefire way to shred the tires.
9 Dodge Challenger SRT Hellcat
Famous for its supercharged whine, the Hellcat first appeared in 2015 with a 6.2-liter Hemi engine supercharged to produce 707 horsepower. All of this results in an incredibly cheeky noise coming from the tailpipe. The Hellcat has been known to set off the alarms of nearby cars, so you’ll need to be careful when driving it down a narrow street.
Unfortunately, the impending discontinuation of the Challenger means that the Hellcat is unlikely to be around much longer for this world. The good news for those who like to wake up their neighbors when they start their car is that Dodge plans to make its electric cars just as loud.
8 2014 Chevrolet Camaro Z/28
Sometimes just the size of an engine makes it loud and nasty. The V8 under the hood of the 2014 Camaro Z/28 is a massive 7.0-liter engine that produces 505 horsepower, and it’s sure to alert those around you with its grunting noise when it’s sitting low in the rev range. and a crying grunt. when it is close to the red line.
Production of the current generation Camaro is slated to end in less than 12 months, and it’s rumored that this could see the Camaro nameplate put on ice for a while. In the meantime, we can still enjoy (or endure) the engine note of the 2014 Z/28. A special car and a sure future collector’s item.
7 2016 Cadillac CTS-V
You can’t get a CTS-V anymore after Cadillac decided to make its lineup sound more digital and replace it with the CT5 for 2019. In fact, these are very similar cars in all but name, and that’s not what We. you are here to talk about it.
The CTS-V was a four-door sedan with a supercharged 6.2-liter V8 that made 640 horsepower and a 0-60 time of 3.7 seconds, so it was basically a family sedan capable of deafening the family he brought. If you also need to deafen the dog, check out the CTS-V sports wagon made between 2010 and 2014.
6 1979 Pontiac Firebird Trans-Am
One of the legendary icons of American muscle cars thanks to their close relationship Smokey and the Bandit, as well as movie star Burt Reynolds collecting Firebirds, the Trans-Am needs almost no introduction. 1979 saw a facelift and only three engines to choose from; thankfully, they were all absolutely baffling.
The dumbest of the engine options was a 6.6-litre V8 as emissions regulations were tightening. This is not to say that he whispered as he passed, in fact, far from it. The Trans-Am is also pretty unsightly, given the large hood decal emblazoned on most production cars.
5 Chevrolet Monte Carlo (sixth generation)
The sixth generation Monte Carlo is far from noisy, but boy does it make up for it on the unpleasantness front. It’s a truly awful-looking car, littering its nameplate with a miserable design that looks like someone stuck a freezer in the back of a two-door compact.
Not only was it hideous to look at, it wasn’t even a real muscle car – later cars might have had a 5.3 liter V8, but it was still a front-wheel-drive bland barge that was a sad end to a name that used to be cool. If for some reason you want one, you’re in luck: they’re worth nothing today.
4 Chevrolet Chevelle SS “454”
Back to a Chevrolet muscle car that was at least nice to look at. The Chevelle SS is arguably the best muscle car Chevy made that wasn’t a Camaro, and possibly the best muscle car of the 1970s. The 454 is a great example of a time when oil was cheap and plentiful and was less concerned about emissions.
Now, you might be wondering why the 454. Well, that refers to the cubic inch capacity of the absolutely outrageous 7.4-liter big-block V8 crammed under the hood. That’s a pretty nasty size for an engine and it made a truly thunderous sound to match.
3 Pontiac GTO (fourth generation)
A nasty engineering and cost-cutting choice saw the fourth-generation GTO scrapped after one year, killing the nameplate for a quarter of a century. Prior to 1974, the GTO had always been based on the full-size “A” platform, and for the new GTO Pontiac was based on the compact “X” platform.
Purists and consumers alike were scathing in their disdain for the smaller GTO; even the rather chunky 5.7-liter V8 couldn’t save it from the “stupid-looking” proportions of the Ventura-based GTO that signed its own death warrant.
2 Ford Mustang Ghia “Foxbody”
The Foxbody Ford Mustang was possibly the least sporty looking Mustang ever designed; with the amount of straight lines and 90-degree angles, it looks as much a Lada as a Mustang. Bad styling aside, it was also a rather pointless idea to launch the “Ghia” trim level as an attempt to make the blue-collar muscle car into a luxury vehicle.
Combined with anemic engines, the smallest of which was a 2.3-liter inline-four, truly pitiful when plugged into what’s supposed to be a big, scary muscle car. That said, they are becoming valuable, so our advice is to put one in the garage and let it appreciate without the need to go anywhere.
1 Dodge Super Bee
Some cars manage to be strong in both senses of the word, and the original Dodge Super Bee was exactly that. In 1968, Dodge took their mid-size Coronet and gave them performance-focused engineering, flashy paint schemes, and huge engines. The engines available were all V8s of varying size: a 6.3, 7.0 and 7.2 liters, all capable of giving the driver hearing problems.
The Super Bee name returned in the late 2000s as a special edition Charger, but despite the attempt to make it as badass as the original with paint and decals, it didn’t have the same thunderous noise coming from the tube exhaust
