A black-on-black 1970 Dodge Coronet Super Bee packing a 426 Hemi, a four-speed stick, a bench seat, and dog-dish hubcaps — one of just four post-car Hemis Dodge ever built. Its first owners weren’t collectors chasing a trophy; they were a Chicago motorcycle club that actually raced it.
Dodge sold roughly 15,500 Super Bees in 1970, and only about 42 of them left the factory with a 426 Hemi under the hood. That number alone makes any Hemi Super Bee a five-alarm find at a car show. But dig one layer deeper into the paperwork and the rarity gets almost absurd: of those 42, just four were coupes — the stripped-down, pillared “post” body style — and every single one of them came with a four-speed manual. No automatics. No hardtops. Four cars, period. This black-on-black post car is one of the four, and unlike most survivors that spent decades tucked away in a heated garage, this one spent its early life being raced by a Chicago motorcycle club before finally settling down on the streets of Detroit.
Four Cars, One Body Style, Zero Room for Error
The video that brought this Super Bee back into the spotlight comes from Twisted Axle Motorsports, and the description doesn’t waste words: “1 of 4 Hemi, 4-speed, bench seat, post car in TX9 black.” That single line packs in nearly every box a Mopar historian checks when hunting for the rarest possible factory configuration. The post-car body — essentially a Coronet coupe with a fixed B-pillar instead of the hardtop’s pillarless roofline — was the budget, back-to-basics option in 1970, favored by racers who wanted a stiffer shell and less weight, not by buyers chasing curb appeal. Pairing it with the 425-horsepower 426 Hemi and a Hurst-shifted four-speed turned an already spartan car into a factory-built weapon.
The bench seat is its own small rarity flag. Most Hemi buyers who were spending serious money on the top engine option also checked the box for bucket seats and a console, especially with a four-speed between their knees. A bench seat on a stick-shift Hemi car signals a buyer — or a fleet order — who cared about function over comfort. Add the dog-dish hubcaps visible in the video instead of Dodge’s flashier Magnum 500 wheels, and the picture becomes clear: this was ordered to be driven hard, not shown off.
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The Redesign That Made the Super Bee a Bargain-Priced Monster
1970 was a pivotal year for the Super Bee. Dodge gave the Coronet-based muscle car a new twin-loop front bumper that the factory PR department nicknamed the “bumblebee wings,” and dropped the base price to $3,074 — genuinely inexpensive for a car that could be optioned all the way up to a 425-horsepower Hemi. The Super Bee carried automatic membership in Dodge’s Scat Pack, the same performance family that included the Challenger and Charger, and buyers picking their engine faced a real ladder: a 335-horsepower 383 as the standard starting point, a 390-horsepower 440 Six Pack for buyers who wanted serious power without the Hemi’s price and insurance surcharge, and the 426 Hemi at the top for the handful of buyers who wanted the best Mopar could build.
That ladder is exactly why the Hemi numbers are so small. Even among Dodge’s own performance-minded customer base, 425 horsepower, solid-lifter maintenance, and a hefty option price scared off all but the most committed buyers. Of the roughly 42 Hemi Super Bees built for 1970, the hardtops split into 11 automatics and 21 four-speeds — already a small enough club. The post-car coupes are the outlier within the outlier: four cars, all four-speed, no exceptions. This car is one of them, finished in the deep, no-nonsense TX9 black rather than one of the high-impact shades like Plum Crazy purple that Dodge introduced that same year and that ended up on nearly 2,000 Super Bees. Where Plum Crazy buyers wanted to be seen, whoever ordered this car in black clearly didn’t.
The “Elephant” Engine That Made the Hemi Option Worth the Risk
The 426 Hemi under this car’s hood traces back to 1964, when Chrysler unleashed the 426 Race Hemi on NASCAR and Richard Petty drove it to victory in the Daytona 500 and the championship that same season. The engine dominated so completely that NASCAR banned it outright for 1965, then told Chrysler the only way back onto the track was to sell a street-legal version to the public. Chrysler obliged in 1966 with the Street Hemi, essentially the same hemispherical-combustion-chamber architecture with cast-iron exhaust manifolds in place of the race car’s tubular headers and a few other concessions to daily-driver duty. Racers and engineers nicknamed it the “Elephant” for the sheer size of its cylinder heads and valve covers, and by 1970 — the year this Super Bee was built — the Elephant engine had been terrorizing drag strips and street corners for four straight seasons. Ordering one in a stripped-down post car with a four-speed wasn’t about comfort or status. It was about getting the closest thing to a NASCAR-bred race engine that Dodge would sell over the counter, wrapped in the lightest, cheapest body they offered.
A Chicago Motorcycle Club Raced It Before It Became a Museum Piece
What separates this Super Bee from the typical low-mileage Hemi trophy car is its early ownership history. According to the video, the car was originally owned by a Chicago motorcycle club that actually raced it — not the kind of pampered, garage-queen story that usually surrounds surviving Hemi cars with this few build numbers. A car built with a bench seat, dog-dish caps, and the lightest available body style practically begs to be used the way this one apparently was: hard, fast, and without much regard for resale value. That it survived club ownership, racing duty, and roughly five and a half decades to end up cruising the streets of Detroit — the “Motor City” itself, and fittingly the birthplace of the engine under its hood — is its own kind of minor miracle.
Most 1-of-4 factory configurations end up in climate-controlled collections, trailered to concours shows and never driven in anger again. This one did the opposite for years before settling into its current life. That history matters to serious Mopar collectors as much as the build sheet does: a documented, numbers-matching Hemi post car with a real-world racing past is worth more to the hobby than a garage queen with an identical window sticker, because it proves the car did exactly what Dodge built it to do.
What a Genuine Hemi Survivor Is Actually Worth Today
The broader Super Bee market gives a sense of just how much a documented Hemi post car like this one is worth to collectors. Standard 383- and 440-powered Super Bee hardtops in good condition typically trade in the $40,000 to $80,000 range at major auctions, with unmodified, low-mile examples pushing toward the top of that band. Six-figure results for exceptional, highly original Super Bees are not unheard of — some of the best-documented cars in recent years have cleared well past $150,000. A genuine, numbers-matching 426 Hemi automatically moves a Super Bee into a different tier of that market entirely, and a Hemi in the ultra-rare post-car, four-speed configuration — one of only four built — sits in a class few appraisers ever get to price, simply because so few of them ever change hands.
Why the Post-Car Hemi Still Sets the Bar for Mopar Rarity
Muscle car rarity gets thrown around loosely — plenty of cars get called “rare” because a dealer wants a bigger number on the price tag. The 1970 Super Bee Hemi post car doesn’t need the hype. The math does the talking: roughly 15,500 Super Bees built, about 42 with the Hemi, and just four in the stripped-down coupe body with the four-speed that made the combination complete. That leaves this black post car in a category with three known siblings worldwide, and every one of those three is presumably being tracked, discussed, and cross-referenced by the same small circle of Mopar registry keepers who catalog cars like this for a living.
Watch the full video above and let us know your thoughts in the comments.
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