A Hyundai Rear-Ended This 1968 Dodge Coronet R/T — Rick Rebuilt It and Named It ‘Mayhem’

A modern-day Hyundai fender bender nearly finished off a 1968 Dodge Coronet R/T that a 426 Hemi option couldn’t outsell. Its owner Rick rebuilt it instead, and the car now carries a fitting new name: Mayhem. See what the factory 440 Magnum and a set of line locks can still do almost six decades later.

A Hyundai nearly finished off a car that a 426 Hemi couldn’t scare in 1968. Rick’s 1968 Dodge Coronet R/T has spent years cruising the streets of metro Detroit, turning heads with its factory-style stance and a 440-cubic-inch Magnum V8 rumbling underneath — until a modern economy car slammed into its rear end badly enough that the build looked finished. Instead of parting it out, Rick brought it back, and the car now answers to a nickname that says everything about how it drives: Mayhem. The story behind that rebuild, and the muscle car underneath it, is worth slowing down for.

The Coronet That Survived a Modern Car Wreck

The video comes from Twisted Axle Motorsports, a channel built around walkarounds and driver interviews with real owners rather than studio-polished reviews. In this one, the crew sits down with Rick to go through his 1968 Dodge Coronet R/T panel by panel, and the car’s backstory comes up almost immediately: it was once rear-ended hard enough by a Hyundai that saving it took real effort. Rick didn’t let it go. What’s on screen today is the result of that work, a driver-quality Coronet R/T that still gets used the way Dodge intended — on the street, regularly, not trailered to shows and left alone.

Owners in the comments fill in details the camera doesn’t catch. One thanks Rick “for talking it and allowing me to talk your ear off,” and mentions wanting to bring the car back out once “Mayhem” is “running a little better” so they can test the line locks together — the front-brake-only hold used to load up the rear tires for a clean burnout without creeping forward. That’s the nickname stuck to this particular Coronet, and it fits a car that was built, in period, specifically to out-accelerate everything else in Dodge’s own showroom. It’s the kind of unscripted exchange that makes owner-interview channels like this one worth watching over a slicker studio production: nobody is reading from a script, and the details that come out — a nickname, a rebuild, a plan for the next drive — are the ones an owner would only share with someone he trusts to actually understand the car.

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Why the Coronet R/T Never Got the Respect It Earned

Dodge introduced the R/T — Road/Track — package on the Coronet in 1967, and it sold well enough right away, around 10,000 cars, that Dodge kept it going for 1968 with an even bigger platform behind it. The entire Coronet line was completely restyled for 1968, sharing its new mid-size B-body sheet metal with the redesigned Charger, and Dodge stacked the lineup from a base Coronet up through Deluxe, 440, 500, and the R/T at the top. Midway through that same 1968 model year, Dodge slotted in the Coronet Super Bee underneath the R/T as a stripped-down, lower-cost way into big-inch performance, mirroring what Plymouth was doing with the Road Runner. The R/T stayed the car for buyers who wanted the full package rather than the cheapest way in: heavy-duty suspension and brakes, dual exhaust, and a standard engine that most other manufacturers would have charged extra for.

That standard engine was the 440-cubic-inch Magnum V8, rated at 375 horsepower at 4,600 rpm and 480 lb-ft of torque at 3,200 rpm, running a 10.1:1 compression ratio through a single four-barrel carburetor. For $604 more, Dodge would drop in the 426 Hemi, and only a small fraction of 1968 Coronet R/T buyers checked that box — most cars, like the bulk of the roughly 10,900 R/Ts built for the model year (up slightly from the 10,181 built in 1967), left the factory with the 440 and Dodge’s heavy-duty TorqueFlite automatic rather than the Hemi and a stick. That makes a clean, running, driver-grade 440 car like Rick’s the far more common survivor today, but “common” for a 1968 R/T still means a car that could embarrass most anything else on the road when new. Buyers could order the R/T as either a two-door hardtop or a convertible, and the coupe body style is the one most commonly seen on the road today. For the full breakdown of what to look for when shopping this generation of Mopar muscle, our 1969 Dodge Super Bee buyer’s guide covers the same B-body rust spots, drivetrain quirks, and restoration costs that apply directly to a Coronet R/T built one year earlier.

What Makes a Driver-Quality Survivor Like This One Special

Plenty of 1968 Coronet R/Ts have been restored into trailer queens that never see daylight outside a show field. Rick’s isn’t one of them. It gets driven around metro Detroit, it’s been rebuilt after real damage instead of retired, and it’s set up with line locks — a modern addition, not a factory option, but one that fits the car’s whole reason for existing. A 440 Magnum making 480 lb-ft doesn’t need much encouragement to break the rear tires loose, and an owner who wants to do that safely and repeatedly, without rolling forward into whatever’s in front of him, is doing exactly what the R/T package was built for in the first place. It’s also worth remembering how much abuse a car like this has already survived to still be on the road nearly six decades later: a factory life of stoplight racing, decades of daily-driver duty for whoever owned it before Rick, and then a modern-day collision that could easily have sent a less-loved car straight to a scrapyard instead of a driveway.

That’s really the throughline of this video: a genuinely quick 1968 muscle car that got hurt, got fixed, and kept doing the job it was built for instead of becoming a static museum piece. The Hemi option might get more attention from collectors chasing rarity, but the 440 Magnum cars are the ones that built the Coronet R/T’s reputation on the street, one stoplight at a time — and Mayhem is still adding to it. Judging by the comments under the video, Rick isn’t done either; the next update from this channel may well be footage of those line locks finally getting tested for real, tires spinning in front of a car nicknamed for exactly that kind of moment.

Watch the full video above and let us know your thoughts in the comments.