ve seen some rather low production totals being touted for certain cars. The 1970 LS6 convertible and LS6 El Camino come to mind. Suspiciously, the quoted numbers also seem to be getting smaller and smaller over time. I have seen claims of 20 LS6 convertibles and 25 LS6 El Caminos. I found this low total for the LS6 El Camino especially hard to believe since there were no less than three genuine examples running around my small home town in the 1980s. I began some extensive research to see if there was any basis in fact for the quoted numbers. I found none. What is known is that there were 4,475 US-built 1970 LS6 vehicles (this does not include an unknown quantity of Canadian-built LS6 coupes that were imported into the US).
             There is no way to know how many of the 4,475 LS6 vehicles were coupes, how many were convertibles, and how many were El Caminos. If there really were only 20 LS6 convertibles and 25 LS6 El Caminos, then there would have to be 4,430 LS6 coupes. If those numbers are to be believed, it would mean that only about one half of one percent of all LS6 vehicles were convertibles and El Caminos. And yet, if one looks at the total number of US-built cars for the 1970 model year that could have been ordered with an LS6, the percentages are vastly different than that. There were 289,622 1970 V8 Malibu coupes, 7,141 1970 V8 Malibu convertibles, and 40,728 1970 V8 Custom El Caminos, yielding a grand total of 337,491 US-built vehicles that could have been ordered with an LS6. This grand total breaks down as 85.8% coupes, 2.1% convertibles, and 12.1% El Caminos. To come up with a statistically-based estimate of the LS6 convertible and El Camino totals, these model percentages can be applied to the 4,475 LS6 total. This yields estimated US totals of 3,840 LS6 coupes, 95 LS6 convertibles, and 540 LS6 El Caminos. (Note that the LS6 coupe total shown on the print includes an estimated number of Canadian-built LS6 coupes imported int...