Today's Down On The Alameda Street car was almost disqualified because '65 Impalas are just so common (this is why you won't be seeing a lot of 60s Beetles here), but since I had one as my daily driver for ten years I have a soft spot for the good ol' '65...
The big Chevy had a new body design for '65, but they kept the cool circular tailights from the '61-'64 models. Ask any Impala owner about the lifespan of the connectors on the lights mounted on the trunk lid (the folks who bought the cheaper Biscayne version got only four taillights).
This here car is a Super Sport, or maybe it just has the emblems. The SS package was pretty much just emblems and a fancy console, anyway; you could still get a six-cylinder Super Sport car. This one doesn't have an engine-size emblem, so we don't know what's under the hood (not that you could tell anyway, what with the rampant engine-swappage going on with 60s Chevrolets; we can assume this one has a V8, based on the big dual exhaust system). You could get the full-size '65 Chevy with a 250 six (groan), a 283 V8 (still pretty slow), the 425-horse 396 (yes!), or the 425-horse 409 (hell yes!).
We'd probably want the Biscayne wagon with 409 and 4-speed, were we to have access to the Chevy Dealer Time Machine, but we'd take this car (and odds are it started life as a 283/Powerglide car, like most of them).
GM made approximately 700 million full-size Chevrolets in 1965 (actually, the true number is 1,764,760 if you count wagons), making the '65 big Chevy the biggest-selling car in Detroit history.
All in all, it's not show quality but it's clean and reasonably complete (and those factory rally wheels really look good on it). Most important, it's a driver. Stay tuned for our next Down On The Street car!
Related:
Autoextremist Has High Hopes for Next Impala [internal]