The Chevrolet 490 is a 4-door touring / 2-door roadster / 2-door coupe (added 1918) / 3-door sedan (added 1918) / chassis "cowl" truck (added 1918) from Chevrolet, built from 1915 to 1922, as the assembly line was turning motoring into an industry. Under the bonnet: 171 .
How it came about
The Chevrolet Series 490 (or Four-Ninety) is an early American automobile, made from 1915 to 1922 by Chevrolet. Introduced in June 1915, the Chevrolet 490 was sold for $490 ($15,595 in 2025 dollars ). It was an immediate success and established the brand as a big player. The name would not denote the price for long (in 1921, the average price was $820), but it would stay low enough to take a chunk out of the Model T market.
The Model T started at $495 at the time. Chevrolet was soon so profitable that Chevrolet owner Billy Durant began buying shares of GM stock with his Chevrolet stock, enough that he was able to take control of GM and merge Chevrolet with it. Electric horns were standard. And by 1921, standard equipment included a speedometer, and ammeter, dome lights (closed-body cars only), and headlight dimmers.
The hardware
Power comes from 171 . It shifts through a Selective-sliding 3-speed cone clutch. The layout matters: a front engine drives the rear wheels, the classic proportion — long bonnet, cabin set back — that most people picture when they picture a sports saloon or a grand tourer. The wheelbase is 102 in. These are manufacturer figures carried by Wikipedia and Wikidata, not road-test measurements.
Family and rivals
Its family tree is legible: it took over from the Chevrolet Series H; its successor was the Chevrolet Superior; assembly was at Oakland Assembly, Oakland, California. Its contemporaries in the catalogue — the British Motor Corporation Morris Cowley, the Oldsmobile Model 43, the Lancia Jota — show what else the money bought that year. Its Chevrolet stablemates include the Chevrolet Adra and the Chevrolet C-10.
What it costs now
There is no federal ownership record for the Chevrolet 490 — it predates the complaint database or was never sold in the United States — so MotorJury publishes no running-cost figure for it. For a car of this age the price is set by the collector market and the condition of the individual example, not by a formula.