Every General Motors V8 engine ever made

As electrification takes over, there may not be many more of these in future, even though new ones are still being developed today. But when the last V8 goes out of production, we will still be able to look back at the great examples of the past.

General Motors has a particularly fine  - though occasionally patchy - history of V8 engines which extends back more than a century. Here we take a look at the good and the bad, in chronological order.

V8 engines were rare, though not unheard of, in 1914, but the Cadillac engine of that year is regarded as the first to have gone into mass production. It made its debut in a car officially called the Type 51, but generally known simply as the Cadillac V8, and was still being used, after several updates and capacity increases, two decades after it first appeared.

Thankfully Cadillac had recently developed the electric starter; hand-cranking a heavy V8 engine would have been a nightmare for owners.

PICTURE: Cadillac Type 53 pickup

In 1909, the Northway Motor and Manufacturing Company became one of the earliest of many firms to be taken over by General Motors. For several years after this, it was a leading producer of engines for GM’s car brands.

But there was more to it than that. Just a year after the Cadillac V8 arrived, Northway began supplying a similar engine to Indianapolis-based Cole for a high-class model pitched as an alternative to Cadillac. This was a rare, but not unique, case of a company owned by GM providing an engine to a direct rival.

PICTURE: Cole Aero Eight

Northway also created the first V8 used by Oldsmobile. The 4.0-litre engine was similar in design to the Cadillac V8 and produced 40 horsepower. It was used in the first two generations of the Oldsmobile Light Eight, which had model names ranging from 44 to 46.

PICTURE: Oldsmobile Light Eight Model 45 Touring

Yet another Northway V8 was adopted by Oakland – which, by a complicated process, can be considered the predecessor of Pontiac – for its Model 50. Perhaps unsurprisingly, this engine bore some resemblance to the Northway units adopted by Cadillac, Cole and Oldsmobile, but it was significantly larger at 6.0 litres.

The first of many Chevrolet V8 engines was designed around the time the brand was incorporated into General Motors. Unlike all the units mentioned so far, whose valves were mounted alongside the cylinders, Chevrolet put them in the cylinder head. Although this design is now outdated, it was still novel in 1917, and had been popularised by Buick only 13 years before.

Chevrolet fitted this engine to the Model D, which was in production only very briefly. There were to be no more Chevy V8s until the 1950s.

The third and final generation of the Light Eight consisted of a single car (with a variety of available body styles) called the Model 47. Some sources suggest that it used that it used the same Northway engine as its predecessors, but in fact its V8 was of a new design, though some of Northway’s ideas were carried over.

While smaller than the previous engine at 3.8 litres, it was also considerably more powerful. In its marketing literature, Oldsmobile reported an output of 63.5 horsepower (“by laboratory tests”) and claimed that it produced the greatest power “per cubic inch of cylinder displacement of any American-made automobile engine”.

Viking was one of four GM companion makes, and the only one occupying a higher market position than its associate (in this case, Oldsmobile). It produced just one model, whose 4.3-litre V8 engine was of monobloc construction, with the block and cylinder heads cast as one piece.

This is great for strength and reliability (the head gaskets can’t fail because there aren’t any) but tricky for maintenance. Not many people would be troubled by that in this case,   because only around 7000 Vikings were built before the brand was abandoned in 1931.

Oakland returned to V8s in 1930 with a new engine which is sometimes said to be the one developed for the Viking, but is accepted by experts as being the work of a different designer.

Uniquely in GM history, Oakland was dropped in favor of its younger companion make, Pontiac, in 1931. Pontiac used the same V8, with minor modifications, for a little longer before replacing it with a straight-eight.

PICTURE: Oakland Model 301

Cadillac joined the monobloc party with a new engine which made its debut in the Series 60 and the larger Series 70. Initially measuring 5.3 litres, it was later expanded to 5.7 litres.

This V8 was also used by Cadillac’s companion make, LaSalle, towards the end of its 13-year existence.

PICTURE: 1939 Cadillac Series 60

Four years into peacetime, Cadillac finally got around to creating a V8 with the overhead-valve arrangement which Buick had been using since 1904. This OHV engine was the first in a very long-lived family which was modernised several times, though retaining more or less the original architecture.

The capacity started out at 5.4 litres, but by the 1970s it had reached a phenomenal 8.2 litres, as fitted to the Eldorado (pictured). At the time, this was a record for an engine used in a mass-produced car, though more exclusive models had already gone much further.

After the Light Eight was discontinued, Oldsmobile steered clear of V8s for a quarter of a century before returning to the layout with an engine nicknamed the Rocket. Slightly smaller than the Cadillac V8 of the same period, the Rocket was initially offered in 5.0-litre form but would eventually be extended to 6.5 litres. It was still available in Oldsmobiles as late as the 1964 model year.

PICTURE: 1950 Oldsmobile 88 Deluxe Club Coupe

Buick called its first V8 the Fireball, but it quickly became known as the Nailhead because its small, vertically-aligned valves looked like a row of nails. The little valves were part of a plan to make the engine perform particularly well at low revs, a feature for which it became famous and respected.

Early Nailheads had capacities of either 4.3 or 5.3 litres. Buick used them only until 1956 before moving on to a new generation.

The Chevy Small Block is probably the most celebrated GM engine of them all. Astonishingly, more than 100 million examples of it have been built, and although it is no longer fitted to a production vehicle it is still available as a ‘crate’ engine for replacements or high-performance conversions.

It first appeared in the 1955 model year Bel Air (pictured) and Corvette. Heavily developed derivatives were still being fitted to GM production vehicles as late as 2003.

Pontiac’s first self-designed V8, as opposed to the one it inherited from Oakland in the early 1930s, amounted to a family of engines which made their debut in 1955 and survived, with many updates, until the 80s.

Capacities ranged from 4.3 to a mighty 7.5 litres. More extreme examples were known as High Output, Super Duty and the slightly misleadingly named Ram Air.

PICTURE: 1957 Pontiac Bonneville

Buick thoroughly designed the Nailhead for 1957 but retained the original engine’s relatively small valves and big-bore, short-stroke layout. Many of these units were known as Wildcat, though the unofficial Nailhead name is still used.

These engines were also considerably larger than their predecessors. They started out at 6.0 litres, and by 1963 Buick had taken the design to 7.0 litres. This was roughly the same as the contemporary second-generation Chrysler Hemi V8, which was so large it was known as the Elephant.

Known as the Rat motor to distinguish it from the Small Block, which was nicknamed Mouse, the Chevy Big Block was originally intended for use in trucks and heavier cars. It is now regarded as being in its seventh generation, but there is a clear line of gradual evolution between today’s engine and the one introduced in the late 1950s.

As used in production vehicles, capacities have ranged from 5.7 to 8.1 litres, but GM currently offers a crate version measuring 9.4 litres. Sonny Leonard’s Godfather dragster engine, which is loosely based on the Big Block, is even more extravagant at 16.5 litres.

In the early 1960s, Buick created an all-aluminum 3.5-litre small-block V8. Oldsmobile produced its own version, which differed from the Buick only in detail. Both engines had very short lives in their original forms, but they were taken on and developed by other companies in the UK and Australia.

Rover bought the rights to the Buick motor and transformed it into its own V8, which powered a great many mainstream, specialist and home-built cars for decades afterwards, including the first two generations of the Range Rover. The Oldsmobile became the basis for the Repco V8, which powered the Brabham cars used by Jack Brabham (1926-2014) and Denny Hulme (1936-1992) to win the 1966 and 1967 Formula 1 World Championships respectively.

Oldsmobile turbocharged the 215 for the same reason so many manufacturers use turbos today – to achieve a combination of superior performance with better economy due to the fact that an off-boost turbo engine uses relatively little fuel.

The Turbo-Rocket, as it was known, appeared briefly in the Jetfire, a derivative of the Oidsmobile Cutlass, which was one of the first turbocharged production cars. High cost, poor reliability and consequent disappointing sales limited the Jetfire’s production life to just two years and 9607 examples.

The second V8 designed in-house by Oldsmobile was by far the longest-lived, remaining in production from 1964 to 1990. There were many variants in both small- and big-block forms, with capacities ranging wildly from 4.3 litres (in an economy version introduced in 1975) to 7.5 litres.

In this era, engines created by one GM brand were often used by at least one other. The Olds V8 found its way into Buicks, Cadillacs, Chevrolets, Pontiacs and even the GMC Motorhome (pictured).

The all-aluminum Buick 215 was replaced by the 4.9-litre 300, which had iron blocks from the start and soon gained iron cylinder heads too. The 5.6-litre 340 and the 5.7-litre 350 were larger derivatives of the same engine.

The 300 family was used extensively in Buick models and in the independently-produced Apollo GT sports car. GM even allowed one of its traditional rivals to fit it to Jeep vehicles in the late 1960s and early 1970s. In those applications it was known as the Dauntless.

PICTURE: 1968 Jeep Wagoneer

Buick phased out the Nailhead in favor of a new V8 known as the Big Block. This started out at 6.6 litres and was expanded first to 7.0 and then to 7.5 litres. This engine would become a victim of the Malaise Era that began in 1973, characterised by enormous engines which used a lot of fuel and created significant pollution to no great effect.

The 7.5-liter Buick V8, known as the 455, was a typical example of this, and was withdrawn in 1976. Buick has not designed an engine as large as this one since then, and almost certainly never will.

PICTURE: 1975 Buick Electra

Australian high-performance cars have frequently been powered by engines from North America, but during the late 1960s GM’s Holden arm developed its own V8. A classic design with a 90-degree angle between the cylinder banks and two pushrod-operated valves per cylinder, it was continuously developed over three decades, and appeared in sizes ranging from 4.1 to 5.7 litres, latterly with fuel injection rather than the original carburettors.

Competition versions were used successfully in Touring Car racing (winning at Bathurst 1000 several times) and in Formula 5000 single-seaters.

PICTURE: Holden Torana LH SLR, 1974

In response to an increasing demand for good fuel economy, Oldsmobile developed a diesel-fuelled version of its second-generation V8. It quickly developed a reputation for being one of the most terrible engines ever produced by General Motors. Among other problems, it had the same number and type of cylinder head bolts as the gasoline V8.

The high compression ratio typical of diesel engines did a good job of pushing the heads away from the block, which rapidly led to a series of unfortunate events. A V6 derivative was less problematic, but the V8 suggested to North American buyers that diesels were not worth considering for cars. Volkswagen would later try and popularise diesel once again in the early 21st century, with results that can fairly be described as disastrous.

PICTURE: Oldsmobile Toronado

Nearly two decades after Oldsmobile had done something similar, Pontiac turbocharged the 4.9-litre version of its V8 engine. This wasn’t simply a case of slapping on a compressor – the block was stronger than that of the naturally-aspirated unit, and there were several internal changes.

The 301 Turbo was available only in the 1980 and 1981 model years, the last two of the second-generation Pontiac Firebird Trans Am (pictured).

The name of this engine hints at its party trick: in the interests of fuel economy and low emissions, this 6.0-litre V8 could operate on six or even four cylinders if it sensed that current conditions did not require it to produce a lot of power. Cylinder deactivation was nothing new (the engine in the unique Schebler car of 1908 could operate as either a V12 or, by disabling one of the carburettors, a straight-six).

But Cadillac tried to control it electronically, and the available technology in terms of computer processing power simply wasn’t up to that in a fast or reliable enough fashion. Cadillac dealers quietly told buyers to switch the system off if they didn’t want to spend a lot of time by the roadside, hood up. It would be a long time after 1981 before engine management systems could successfully deal with this sort of thing.

PICTURE: 1981 Cadillac Seville

The failure of the 8-6-4 forced Cadillac to bring its new V8 to market earlier than planned. Insufficiently developed by 1982, the original 4.1-litre version known as the HT-4100 became known almost immediately for poor reliability, and it is now referred to in similar terms to those used for the unfortunate 8-6-4 and Oldsmobile Diesel.

The High Technology was later improved and enlarged, first to 4.5 litres and later to 4.9. These engines have a much better reputation than the HT-4100.

PICTURE: 1981 Cadillac Fleetwood

Better known at the time for its two-stroke engines, Detroit Diesel (then owned by GM) created a 6.2-litre V8 in the early 1980s. This was replaced around a decade later by a 6.5-litre version which was often turbocharged.

The engine was first used in the C/K pickup truck (pictured) marketed by both Chevrolet and GMC. It also found a home in other, quite different vehicles including the Chevrolet Suburban SUV and the Hummer H1.

While the original Small Block was still in production, GM introduced an almost completely new successor. Initially rated at 300hp, the 5.7-litre V8 made its debut in the 1992 Chevrolet Corvette. A 330 hp version arrived four years later, and there was also a more economical 4.3-litre short-stroke.

This Small Block was discontinued in 1997, but by then it had appeared in a wide variety of cars, including several Chevrolets, the Pontiac Firebird, the Buick Roadmaster and the Cadillac Fleetwood.

PICTURE: Chevrolet Corvette

For a large American V8 of the 20th century, the Northstar was remarkably complex, with twin overhead camshafts and four valves per cylinder. It made its debut 4.6-litre form in the Allanté (pictured), and subsequently appeared in many other Cadillacs, often as a supercharged 4.4.

The Northstar was also used in the Pontiac Bonneville and Buick Lucerne, and – as a 4.0-litre twin-turbo producing 650 hp – in a sports racing car which competed in the American Le Mans Series.

Officially called the L47, this V8 is more commonly known by the name of the only GM-built car it was ever fitted to. Closely related to the Cadillac Northstar, it was also used in the limited-production Shelby Series 1 roadster.

Sharing its 4.0-litre capacity with the Northstar race engine, it produced 250 hp. Oldsmobile created a 215 hp 3.5-litre V6 derivative which has become known as the Shortstar. Both versions were discontinued when GM closed down the Oldsmobile brand in 2004.

Often referred to as the LS, the third-generation Small Block had almost no connection with the previous two. It was effectively a clean-sheet design, though unlike the earlier Cadillac Northstar it had the traditional arrangement of two pushrod-operated valves per cylinder.

Available in capacities from 4.8 to 6.0 litres, the LS was produced in many forms, and appeared in all sorts of Chevrolets from the Corvette to the Express (pictured), along with Buicks, Cadillacs, GMs, Holdens and the Isuzu Ascender.

Duramax is a family of V8 diesels built by DMAX, a joint venture between General Motors and Isuzu. The first came off the line in July 2000, and production reached two million in March 2017.

All full-scale Duramax engines (as opposed to the smaller units known collectively as Baby Duramax) are of 6.6 litres, and are used in commercial and private trucks and vans. A 4.5-litre version was announced but then put on indefinite hold shortly after the global financial crisis of 2008.

PICTURE: 2022 Chevrolet Silverado 2500 HD

The Small Block was so thoroughly updated in 2004 that it is considered to have entered a new generation. First available in the 2005 model year Corvette and the Chevy SSR retro pickup, its capacities ranged from 4.8 to 7.0 litres. In power terms, the highlight was the supercharged 6.2-liter version fitted to the Corvette ZR1, which was rated at 638 hp.

Offered with both variable valve timing and cylinder deactivation (or ‘displacement on demand’), the engine appeared in a great many GM products including the Hummer H3 and the Saab 9-7X (pictured).

The current Small Block retains the traditional two valves per cylinder and pushrod operation, but is otherwise thoroughly modern, with new cylinder heads, direct fuel injection and active fuel management. It has been used in sports cars, the fastest of today’s Cadillacs, and also in heavier vehicles such as the Cadillac Escalade (pictured).

In addition, a naturally-aspirated version of the unit became the first engine placed in the middle of a Corvette, when the eight-generation version of the nameplate arrived in the 2020 model year.

In almost complete contrast to the Small Block, the Blackwing was a 4.2-litre V8 with two overhead camshafts per cylinder bank and two turbochargers. It first appeared in 550 hp form in the Cadillac CT6-V. Only 275 examples were earmarked for production, and all of them were pre-ordered almost immediately. A detuned 500 hp Blackwing was later offered in the Cadillac CT6 Platinum.

The engine was never fitted to anything else. Despite its name, the CT5-V Blackwing was powered by the 6.2-liter supercharged fifth-generation Small Block, to the annoyance of some Cadillac enthusiasts.

The current LT6 and LT7 units will perhaps be two of the final V8 engines made by General Motors. Unlike any of the Chevy Small Blocks, the 5.5-litre LT6 (also known as the ‘Gemini’) has twin overhead camshafts and a flat-plane crankshaft, and can rev to 8600rpm. It made its first appearance in the C8-generation Corvette Z06 (pictured) in 2022.

Meanwhile, the LT7 was developed in tandem with the LT6, and retains a displacement of 5.5-litres. However, with a larger combustion chamber, strengthened pistons and a pair of mono-scroll turbochargers, power is boosted to 1064 hp. In 2024, the LT7 debuted in the brand new Corvette ZR1, which has since set a top speed record of 233mph – making it the fastest American production car of all time.

If you enjoyed this story, please click the Follow button above to see more like it from Autocar