It's all the links they post to some half-assed crappy website called "carbuzz" or some such. Drives me crazy. Lazy hosting if you ask me.
Gas Monkey Garage is doing the same thing.
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Why is a Cuda not considered a Muscle Car? The accepted definition of a Muscle Car is "any of a group of American-made 2-door sports coupes with powerful engines designed for high-performance driving." I would say the Cuda definitely falls into that category as well.
That's the "accepted" definition now, mainly championed by guys with Pony and Sports cars.
Here's some history from Jack Smith, creator of the Roadrunner...
"Muscle cars came out of the youthful exuberance that followed World War II. Many people who came back from military assignments had a lot of experience in motor pools. They were accustomed to working on vehicles and doing things to improve them. It was from this experience that street rods were born and a culture of performance was built up.
This culture was recognized by a guy named Jim Wangers, the account executive for the advertising agency that handled Pontiac’s LeMans. He foresaw the possible success of a muscle car, a performance car in the mid-sized category, and prevailed upon a sufficient number of people at Pontiac to give it a shot, and the GTO was born in 1964."
Chrysler eventually copied them, but before they could do so, Chrysler had to create a plan aimed specifically at the mid-sized market. At the time, the Plymouth product planning group was split into two sub-groups. One group did the Furys together with the mid-sized cars, with the latter a sort of second thought. The other group did the compact and the pony cars. The mid-sized cars just didn’t have a home. That was corrected in 1965 when Plymouth created an office for mid-sized car planning. At the same time the company set up a similar office over in the Dodge camp."
A bodies, like the Valiant and Barracuda, were initially classified as Compact cars. Back then you had Sub-Compact, Sports, Compact, Mid-Size/Intermediate, and Full-Size. Then along came Ford with the Mustang, which set a new trend for Compacts with the long front-deck/short rear-deck look, which coined the new term Pony cars, which is why Smith says a group was dedicated to Compacts and Pony cars as they shared a lot of components.
Just as all the mid-size/intermediate performance coupes were called Muscle cars, all the long front-deck/short rear-deck Compact Mustang clones were referred to as Pony cars. These included the Mustangs, Cougars, 70-74 E bodies, Camaros, Firebirds, Trans Ams, AMX, etc.
Another differentiation is that Ford designed the Mustang to compete not with intermediate/mid-size cars but with Sports cars. That's why they got Caroll Shelby and others to work on getting Mustangs sanctioned for competition in sports car events, and the other makers followed suit. That's why the Mustang race packages were all SCCA-approved and other Pony cars were designed for sports car events such as AAR, Trans Am (which is what the T/A in Challenger T/A stands for), Can Am, etc. Muscle cars were all designed for sanctioning by NHRA and NASCAR.
You go back to the 60s and 70s, you find the Pony car folks wanted nothing to do with the Muscle car crowd. Pony cars were defacto Sports cars with light weight, great speed, and handling. Muscle cars were fast but had no handling and were good for nothing but big ovals and straight lines. Nothing pissed off Pony car guys more than calling their cars Muscle cars. Now jump ahead to today, and the term Pony sounds girly and Sports sounds too Euro-trashy, and now all the Pony and Sports car guys want to glum onto the Muscle name because it sounds cool and the Muscle car market is hot. But they can't rewrite history.
