[LateNightCable]

Ferrari's of that era cost a fortune to maintain and repair too if you want them to work.

As for muscle cars, a '63 Grand Prix with a 421 HO Tri-Power ( 370hp. 460lbft/tq. which technically is more power than the GTO ever made most of the time ) is a certifiable muscle car to me. Officially you can say 1964 because of the GTO, and the term itself might have been coined then. But there were mid-size cars with performance on their minds before that. Heck, the Chrysler 300C was a large car with an available high performance package which gave it 390hp and a mandatory manual tranny, and that was in 1957. Who could say this was not a muscle car? And the only reason "pony cars" came about was because the Mustang was named after a horse, and they were reletively inexpensive. There is no breed of horse called a Z or Supra that I know of, and those cars are not cheap.

The Corvette is not really a "muscle car", it's a sports car. A 2005 Pontiac GTO on the other hand is a two door mid-size coupe with the same engine as the Vette. This is a modern muscle car. The Infiniti M45 is probably the closest thing Japan has to a muscle car. It's a large car with a 4.5 V8 pumping 335hp and 340lbft/tq. But somehow I don't think of muscle car when thinking of the M45.

If you think only in very strict terms, then yeah, muscle cars are a purely American thing. America cornered the market on large, fast V8 powered two-doors long ago.