The Elusive Electric Impala Is The Most Exciting Car That GM Decided Not To Build According To Searches At The End Of 2024

Earlier this week I was looking at a report of interest in cars. The first car on the list was the Honda Prelude, which is a nice but hardly exciting car, but the second car on the list was the 2025 Chevy Impala, which was way ahead of the cars farther down the list. I thought, “Whoa, I hadn’t heard of a 2025 Impala,” and got excited. The 1965 Impala SS was a great car; I owned one in the day. The car got in and out of a lot of trouble. I drove a more recent Impala a decade ago, but it was a bit of a disappointment: It had a huge trunk, no real power, and it wasn’t.

I ran into a video of someone in my age group who had also had a 1965 Impala, but he’d had to sell it to pay bills while raising his kids. So, his son tracked the car down and gave it to him as a gift. The video had me tearing up badly, but it also had me wondering about the 2025 Impala, so I went to check it out, sadly all of these people, me included, were excited about a car that GM wasn’t planning to build.

But it got me thinking, shouldn’t it? Couldn’t an electric Impala SS potentially be a Tesla S killer?

Creating A Tesla S Killer

The Tesla Model S is a powerful car. In its most powerful mode, it’ll take on real dragsters on a dragstrip and embrace them. A few months back, I saw a video in which, after the first run, the car was banned from the track because any car hitting 9s or less had to have a full roll cage, and the Tesla, which was the guy’s daily driver, wasn’t getting a roll cage.

It is powerful, it handles well, its quality isn’t excellent, and it doesn’t look or, as an electric, sound fast. Every Tesla is a sleeper, but actually racing people on the street is very dangerous, looking like you are fast and dangerous, and if I’m buying a performance car (I have two, an Audi E-Tron GT and a ’70 Jaguar E-Type with a 569 HP crate engine in it) and both of those cars look fast, they aren’t as fast as that Tesla, but they are quick. But I don’t race them; I show them off, and both cars turn heads. Tesla doesn’t, and Tesla hasn’t been doing that great of late in sales.

If you wanted to take on Tesla’s Model S you’d need a car that had the room of a sedan but that looked really quick. Wouldn’t an updated Electric Impala be the perfect car to look quick and, like Tesla, with the right upgrades, be quick? And you could do something like Stellantis did with the Electric Charger to give it an AI-driven engine roar.

What The Electric Impala SS Could Be

The picture above is what ChatGPT 4.0 created when I asked it to draw an electric Chevy Impala explicitly designed to compete with the Tesla Model S. Note the aggressive stance, the gull-wing doors (I’m not sure I’d do Gull-Wing doors, but this is what the AI came up with), and a look that conveyed, certainly better than a Tesla Model S does, the robust nature of this Tesla-killing EV. 

With performance breakthroughs on batteries, the range should be above 400 miles and 0-60 below 3 seconds. Those tires would provide a lot of grip for the twin electric motors or, if GM wanted to go even more advanced, four-hub motors. In a performance configuration, power would be over 1,000 HP and Torque over 1,100 lb.-ft to overcome the Tesla Model S.

Granted, there would be lower-performance versions, but if you used Chinese breakthroughs, you could sell this for under $100K, making it a speedy, affordable car.

Wrapping Up:

Tesla has the performance crown, but its cars look like someone is sitting on a watermelon. They are nicely rounded, and they don’t look bad. They don’t look fast. And, like a lot of people, I’m not a huge fan of Tesla at the moment. This allows GM to break out and take some share from Tesla, but they’d need the right car. Tesla doesn’t have a sports car like the Corvette, and their Cybertruck is a bit of an embarrassment, so why not go after the Tesla Model S with a car like this electric Chevy Impala SS? I’d rather drive this car than a Tesla, how about you?

 Rob Enderle is a technology analyst at Torque News who covers automotive technology and battery developments. You can learn more about Rob on Wikipedia and follow his articles on Forbes, X, and LinkedIn.

One of the most searched cars on the internet last year was the 2025 Impala. Sadly, one isn’t coming. However, it could be a Tesla Model S killer if designed and built right.