Chevrolet 490

The Chevrolet 490 is one of 277 Chevrolet models in the MotorJury library, the catalogue that sets out to hold every car ever made — production, prototype and concept alike. The record places its introduction in 1915. The photography on this page is hotlinked from Wikimedia Commons under an open licence, with the photographer credited on every frame.

The era it was born into

To read the Chevrolet 490 properly it helps to place it in its decade. The 1910s were the decade the automobile became an industry — Ford's moving assembly line cut the price of motoring by an order of magnitude and forced every rival to industrialise or vanish. Any car launched into that world was shaped by it — by what materials, engineering and regulation allowed, and by what buyers of the day demanded. Its direct contemporaries in this catalogue, introduced within three years of it, include the British Motor Corporation Morris Cowley, the Lion-Peugeot Lion-Peugeot Type VD2, the Oldsmobile Oldsmobile Model 43 — the cars a buyer of the period would actually have cross-shopped.

The numbers, read closely

On paper, the Chevrolet 490 reads like this: the record lists its engine as 171 in3, 24 hp Chevrolet Straight-4 engine; kerb weight is recorded at wheelbase = 102 in; drive goes through Selective-sliding 3-speed cone clutch; the layout is FR layout. Every figure above is a manufacturer specification carried by the Wikipedia infobox or the open Wikidata record for this model — nothing on this page is estimated, and where a source is silent the row simply does not appear.

Its place in the Chevrolet story

Within Chevrolet's own catalogue the Chevrolet 490 sits alongside the Chevrolet Adra, the Chevrolet C-10, the Chevrolet Camaro (2015), the Chevrolet Corsa. The record names the Chevrolet Series H as its predecessor and the Chevrolet Superior as its successor, fixing its place in the model line's chronology. Design is credited to name = Chevrolet Series 490. Assembly is recorded at United States: / Oakland Assembly, Oakland, California / North Tarrytown Assembly, Tarrytown, New York / Flint Assembly, Flint, Michigan / Norwood Assembly, Norwood, Ohio / St. Lou.

How this catalogue works

This library is generated, verified and rebuilt from the open record on every deploy. The catalogue skeleton comes from Wikidata, specifications from Wikipedia's infoboxes under CC BY-SA, photography from Wikimedia Commons under each file's own licence, and the ownership data from United States federal safety records. Nothing is written by hand and nothing is invented: every fact on this page traces to a public source, and every page is rebuilt nightly as those sources improve. Errors in the source record will appear here too — and disappear the night the source is corrected.

Why concepts and prototypes are in the library

Most car databases stop at series production. This one deliberately does not, because concept cars, racing specials and cancelled prototypes are where the industry thinks out loud — the ideas tested in public years before they reach a showroom. Holding them beside the production cars they inspired makes the lineage legible: nearly every landmark road car in this library has a concept ancestor somewhere in the catalogue, and the connections run through the era links on every page.

From catalogue to ownership

What this page cannot yet tell you is what the Chevrolet 490 costs to live with — that is a different dataset. MotorJury's ownership verdicts are computed from federal complaint and recall records plus EPA economy data, published per model year as the nightly ingest reaches each car. If this model was sold in the United States, its years will surface in the ownership database; browse it live or price any car yourself with the true-cost calculator.