1970 Dodge Super Bee in Plum Crazy Purple & 440 Engine

A Plum Crazy Purple 1970 Dodge Coronet Super Bee, loaded with a 440 Six Pack, four-speed pistol-grip shifter, and white bucket seats, stopped traffic at the World of Wheels show in Rosemont, Illinois. One viewer owned nearly the same car at seventeen. Another notes cars like it have become darlings of the Mecum auction circuit. Watch the full walk-around to see why.

Plum Crazy Purple is not a color you can miss, and that is exactly the point. Dodge built it as one of its High Impact colors specifically to be impossible to ignore across a parking lot, and on this particular 1970 Coronet Super Bee, the paint is only the first thing that grabs attention. Underneath it sits an options sheet that, according to the people who actually owned cars like this one, reads like a wish list rather than a spec chart. What is under the hood is the part that turns nostalgia into an argument.

A Color That Announces Itself Before the Engine Does

Filmed at the World of Wheels Car Show in Rosemont, Illinois on March 2, 2017, Lou Costabile’s segment on this 1970 Dodge Coronet Super Bee starts, unsurprisingly, with the paint. Plum Crazy Purple was part of Dodge’s High Impact color program, a marketing push built around loud, attention-grabbing shades meant to separate Mopar muscle from anything Ford or GM was offering in the same showroom season. Paired with a white interior, the combination reads as one of the most recognizable Mopar color pairings of the entire muscle car era, and it is exactly why commenters kept circling back to the paint before mentioning anything mechanical.

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Six Pack, Pistol Grip, and the Rest of the Bee’s Options Sheet

One commenter ran through the full build sheet from memory, Plum Crazy paint, a 440 Six Pack engine, four-speed manual transmission, pistol-grip shifter, console, a tic-toc-tach gauge cluster, white bucket seats, and full Bee badging. That is not a random assortment of options, it is close to the maximum a buyer could check off a 1970 Super Bee order form, and a commenter’s simple reaction, awesome Mopar, undersells just how deliberately loaded this particular car’s specification actually is.

The Owner Who Had One at Seventeen

A different commenter offered a more personal build history, they owned a 70 Coronet Super Bee at age seventeen, originally equipped with a 383 that they later swapped for a 440 four-barrel backed by a 727 automatic and an 8 and three-quarter inch rear end. They loved the car, they wrote, but eventually had to let it go over insurance costs, a common story for muscle car owners of that generation, when high-performance coverage on a car this loud, in every sense, could outpace what a teenage owner could realistically afford to keep paying.

Why Mecum Buyers Chase This Exact Combination

Costabile himself notes in the segment that cars matching this specification have been recent darlings of Mecum’s muscle car auctions, and the reasoning tracks, Plum Crazy paint, a documented 440-based drivetrain, and a manual transmission combine three of the most collector-desirable traits a 1970 Mopar can have into one car. Auction buyers chase color rarity, drivetrain authenticity, and transmission type separately all the time, finding all three checked simultaneously is what turns a solid Super Bee into a headline lot.

The World of Wheels Circuit

World of Wheels shows, held in convention centers across multiple U.S. cities each winter, have functioned for decades as a proving ground where owners bring freshly restored or newly acquired cars for their first real public showing. A Rosemont stop in early March places this Super Bee squarely in that circuit’s Midwest leg, and the crowd reaction Costabile captured, enthusiasts recognizing the Six Pack badge and options list on sight, is a good measure of how well-versed World of Wheels attendees tend to be on exactly this kind of detail.

Plum Crazy’s Place in Mopar’s High-Impact Color Story

Plum Crazy was part of a broader Chrysler strategy in 1970 that also included colors like Hemi Orange, Sublime, and Panther Pink, each one designed to be a talking point on its own. Of that lineup, Plum Crazy has aged into one of the most requested colors among modern restorers specifically doing 1970 Mopar builds, which is part of why a well-documented original example generates this much comment-section energy more than fifty years after it left the factory.

A Car Enthusiasts Keep Coming Back To

By the end of the segment, it is clear this Super Bee is not just a nice color parked at a car show, it is close to a reference example of what a fully-optioned 1970 Mopar B-body was supposed to be. Between the personal ownership stories in the comments and Costabile’s own note about its auction desirability, this is exactly the kind of car that keeps its audience coming back, one World of Wheels stop, and one comment section, at a time.

The Six Pack’s Place in Chrysler’s Engine Wars

The 440 Six Pack, three two-barrel carburetors feeding a 440-cubic-inch V8, was Chrysler’s answer to buyers who wanted Hemi-adjacent performance without the Hemi’s price tag, insurance surcharge, and finicky street manners. It delivered genuinely competitive power for a fraction of the cost, which made it, in period, one of the smartest performance options a Mopar buyer could check, and it remains one of the most sought-after drivetrain configurations among modern collectors specifically because it offers big-block muscle without the premium the Hemi badge still commands at auction. A Super Bee built exactly this way represents Chrysler’s engine lineup working precisely as the marketing once promised.

What a Car Like This Brings at Auction Today

Documented, numbers-matching Super Bees finished in a High Impact color with a Six Pack engine and four-speed manual routinely draw six-figure bids at major auctions today, a dramatic climb from the used-car prices these same cars carried when original teenage owners, like the commenter who once owned one, were trading them in or letting insurance costs push them out of the garage. That gap between period value and current collector demand is part of why walk-around videos like this one, showing a well-preserved original in detail, draw so much attention from buyers doing research ahead of their next auction bid.

A Segment That Still Gets Referenced

Years after this walk-around was filmed, it continues to surface in discussions among Mopar owners researching correct 1970 Super Bee build combinations, cited specifically for its clear view of factory-correct badging, interior trim, and underhood details that are harder to verify from photos alone. That ongoing usefulness, well past its original car-show upload, is part of what separates a well-documented walk-around like this one from the thousands of car show clips that get watched once and forgotten.

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