1970 Chrysler 300 Convertible in Red Paint

Peggy Szarzynski’s husband Dennis gave her this 1970 Chrysler 300 convertible as a birthday present, not realizing it would become one of the last full-size Chrysler convertibles ever built. Finished in red with the brand’s distinctive hidden headlights and fuselage styling, it’s a rare survivor from an era before gas prices sent most of its kind to the scrapyard. Watch to hear Peggy’s full story.

A birthday gift doesn’t usually come with a V8 under the hood and a folding top, but that’s exactly how Peggy Szarzynski ended up behind the wheel of this 1970 Chrysler 300. Her husband Dennis picked a car that happened to be the very last of its kind, though neither of them may have realized it at the time. Decades later, survivors like this one are rare enough that even longtime Mopar fans in the comments say they’d never seen one in person before.

A Birthday Present Like No Other

Peggy Szarzynski received this Chrysler 300 convertible as a birthday gift from her husband Dennis, a detail that turns an already striking car into a genuinely personal story. It’s the kind of gift that doesn’t just mark an occasion, it becomes part of the family’s history for the decades that follow, long after the birthday itself is forgotten.

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The Last Full-Size Chrysler Convertible

1970 was the final model year Chrysler offered a full-size convertible, making this 300 one of the last examples of a body style the company would never bring back in this form. Comments on the video point out that Plymouth and Dodge’s equivalent convertibles were similarly winding down, with Dodge only offering the base Polara and Plymouth limited to the Fury III, leaving the 300 as one of the more upscale options left standing.

Fuselage Styling and Hidden Headlights

This 300 wears Chrysler’s fuselage body design, introduced in 1969, characterized by rounded, aerodynamic-looking panels that were a significant departure from the sharper-edged cars of the mid-1960s. Paired with hidden headlights tucked behind a body-color panel, the design gave the 300 a cleaner, more modern face than most full-size cars of its era on the road.

Priced Against the Best of Detroit

According to comments from period-knowledgeable viewers, the 1970 Chrysler 300 competed directly against the Oldsmobile Delta 88 Royale, Buick Wildcat Custom, and Mercury Marauder X-100, but was priced high enough to sit closer to the Oldsmobile Ninety-Eight and Buick Electra 225 Custom instead. That pricing tier meant the 300 wasn’t just another full-size cruiser, it was positioned as a genuine luxury performance option for buyers who wanted more.

Not the TNT, But Still the Real Thing

Sharp-eyed commenters note this particular 300 doesn’t appear to carry the TNT performance package, which added a dual-snorkel air cleaner, dual exhaust, and a different camshaft profile for more aggressive output. Without those upgrades, this convertible represents the standard 300 experience, still a substantial car with Chrysler’s big-block power, just without the factory’s most aggressive tune under the hood.

What a Survivor Like This Is Worth

On the collector market, a well-kept 1970 Chrysler 300 convertible generally sells for a fraction of what a contemporary Hemi-powered Road Runner or Superbird would bring, simply because the 300 was marketed as a luxury cruiser rather than a street racer. That positioning has kept prices more accessible for buyers who want genuine 1970 Mopar styling and presence without competing for the same six-figure muscle car budgets.

What Convertible Owners Watch For

Convertible-specific problem areas on fuselage-era Chryslers include the folding top’s hydraulic pump, which can fail after decades of underuse, and rust that tends to develop around the lower rear quarters where the top well collects moisture over time. A convertible kept largely original and well-maintained, like this red example, has typically avoided the kind of top-mechanism rebuild that many surviving 300 convertibles eventually require.

The Weight of the 300 Name

This 300 belongs to the non-letter series, the mainstream trim that succeeded Chrysler’s legendary 300 letter cars of the late 1950s and early 1960s, machines like the 300F and 300G that helped define the model’s high-performance reputation. By 1970 the letter series had ended, but the 300 nameplate still carried enough prestige that Chrysler used it to anchor its most upscale full-size offering, convertible included.

Under the Hood of a 1970 300

Chrysler offered the 1970 300 with a standard 440-cubic-inch V8 producing 350 horsepower, with the more aggressive TNT version pushing output higher still through its dual exhaust and revised camshaft. Even in standard form, the 440 gave this full-size convertible genuine highway-passing power, a trait period road tests consistently praised even as they criticized the car’s considerable curb weight.

A Dealership Show With Its Own History

Like other cars featured from the same event, this 300 was filmed at the Larry Roesch dealership’s Annual Show & Swap Meet in Elmhurst, an event that has become a reliable venue for exactly this kind of well-preserved, driver-owned survivor. Shows built around a local dealership rather than a national circuit tend to attract cars with long, single-family ownership histories, exactly the kind of story Peggy and Dennis’s convertible represents.

Shared Bones With the Imperial

The 1970 Chrysler 300 shared much of its fuselage-era platform and running gear with the more upscale Imperial, Chrysler’s flagship luxury nameplate at the time, which is part of why the 300 rode and felt more substantial than a Newport despite sitting one rung below Imperial in the corporate hierarchy. That shared engineering gave 300 buyers luxury-car isolation and comfort in a package that still wore Chrysler’s own performance-oriented badge rather than Imperial’s more sedate image.

A Survivor Worth Celebrating

Full-size convertibles like this one became early casualties of the 1970s fuel crises; as gas prices spiked, buyers found large, thirsty convertibles increasingly impractical, and many were scrapped, parted out for their big-block engines, or simply neglected over the following decade. Cars like this Chrysler 300 occupy a strange place in muscle car history, too luxurious to be a straight-up muscle car, too powerful to be dismissed as just a cruiser, and rare enough today that most enthusiasts have never seen one in person. For Peggy, the car has become less about its rarity on paper and more about the memory of the gift itself, which is exactly the kind of story that keeps full-size convertibles like this one being trailered to local shows instead of sold off. It’s a survivor in every sense of the word, outlasting both the fuel crisis that killed its own body style and the decades of neglect that claimed most of its siblings.

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