Dodge Called the Coronet the Charger’s Plain Cousin — Then Snuck Its Rarest Hemi Into One Anyway

A 1970 Dodge Coronet Super Bee is heading to auction with its original fender tag intact — one of a scarce handful built with the 426 Hemi and a four-speed stick. Here’s why Dodge’s supposedly plain muscle car hid one of its rarest engines, and why that final Coronet year mattered.

Ask most muscle car fans to rank Dodge’s 1970 lineup and the Coronet lands near the bottom — overshadowed by its flashier sibling, the Charger, which borrowed the same B-body platform and ran off with all the attention. But buried in that supposedly plain lineup was a factory option so rare that Dodge built only a scarce handful of them: a 426 Hemi paired with a four-speed manual, wearing the Super Bee badge. One of those survivors, a Burnt Orange 1970 Coronet Super Bee, is now headed to auction with its original fender tag, a fresh restoration, and paperwork tracing it back to a 2015 feature in Mopar Action magazine. It’s a reminder that the “lesser” Dodge sometimes hid the bigger surprise.

The Coronet Everyone Overlooked

In this video, veteran Mopar historian Steve Magnante walks through the car ahead of its scheduled sale at Richmond Auctions’ October 24–25 event, decoding the factory fender tag line by line — the paint code, the trim combination, the engine and transmission call-outs — to prove the car is exactly what the auction listing claims. He points out the Ramcharger hood’s twin functional scoops, ducted straight into an underhood air box, and the trunk-mounted Go Wing spoiler that few Super Bee buyers actually ordered, along with the small details — door handles, trim badging, the specific “C” stripe treatment — that separate a genuine factory build from a clone built decades later.

The comment section underneath the video turned into its own small history lesson. Longtime owners debated whether the Coronet’s standard bench seat was actually the better choice over the optional high-back buckets, with several arguing the buckets of that era were uncomfortable enough to feel designed as punishment. More than one viewer also pushed back on the idea that the Coronet was ever really “below” the Charger — pointing out that the Charger itself started life in 1966 as a sportier spinoff of the Coronet platform, not the other way around, which makes the Super Bee less a budget afterthought and more the Coronet reclaiming some of the glory its sibling had taken.

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How a “Plain” Dodge Nearly Became a Footnote

The Super Bee name first appeared in 1968 as Dodge’s direct answer to Plymouth’s Road Runner, which had launched that same year as a bare-bones, big-engine muscle car aimed at buyers who wanted speed without the luxury trim. Dodge’s version was built on the Coronet’s two-door coupe body, priced to undercut the Charger while still offering genuine big-block performance underneath a plainer shell. For three model years — 1968, 1969, and 1970 — the Super Bee lived exclusively on that Coronet platform, wearing a cartoon bumblebee badge that belied how serious the hardware underneath could get.

1970 turned out to be the last time it would. For 1971, Dodge restyled the Coronet lineup down to four-door sedans and station wagons only, leaving no two-door coupe for the Super Bee to live on. Dodge responded by moving the Super Bee badge over to the Charger for one final model year before shelving the name entirely — it wouldn’t return until Dodge revived it on the Charger SRT8 platform for the 2007 model year, where it stayed in production through 2014.

Throughout its Coronet years, the 426 Hemi was a genuine factory RPO option on the Super Bee, not an over-the-counter race part bolted on after the fact. Rated at 425 horsepower and 490 lb-ft of torque from the factory, it was the same engine wearing the “Elephant” nickname in Dodge and Plymouth’s biggest NASCAR and NHRA efforts of the era. But take rates on the street version were tiny. Dodge is generally cited as having built only around 42 Hemi-equipped Super Bees for 1970 across both transmission choices, which puts any individual four-speed example — like the car in this video, which the auction listing counts among roughly two dozen built with that exact Hemi-and-stick combination — into genuinely rare territory, even if exact factory transmission splits are hard to confirm from surviving records alone decades later.

Dodge wasn’t the only Detroit builder quietly tucking serious hardware into an unassuming body that era. Chevrolet’s own Monte Carlo once hid an entire illegal drag racer under its skin, proof that the biggest surprises in muscle car history didn’t always come wearing the obvious badge.

The Fender Tag That Tells the Whole Story

This particular car, VIN WM23R0G227325, wears Chrysler’s FK5 Burnt Orange paint with black Super Bee “C” stripes, a black bench-seat interior, and factory Rallye gauges. It rides on new Goodyear Polyglas GT reproduction tires wrapped around 15-inch Magnum 500 wheels, and comes with a Wise Report documenting the restoration alongside receipts and photos. According to the listing, the car was restored back to its fender-tag specifications and previously appeared in Mopar Action magazine’s December 2015 issue — the kind of paper trail that matters enormously once a car’s rarity starts getting questioned, since Hemi Super Bees have long been a popular target for clone builds given how much a genuine one commands over an ordinary 383 or 440 car.

That documentation is also why an auction house like Richmond brings in someone like Magnante in the first place: a fender tag only means something if a buyer can trust that the numbers printed on it still match the metal underneath it fifty-plus years later. For a car this rare, the paperwork isn’t a footnote — it’s half the sale.

None of that paperwork changes what makes the car interesting in the first place: a model year, a nameplate, and a platform that Dodge itself was quietly phasing out, carrying the same 426 Hemi that defined the era’s fastest machines. The Coronet Super Bee never got the glamour the Charger did. It didn’t need it — it just needed the right engine, and for one brief run, Dodge gave it exactly that.

Magnante himself is part of why this video carries weight with Mopar collectors. A longtime fixture of Mopar Action and Hot Rod magazines before becoming a familiar face in Mecum and now Richmond Auctions broadcasts, he built a career on exactly this kind of fender-tag forensics — the unglamorous but essential work of proving a car is what it claims to be before real money changes hands. His return to on-camera work after a period away was enough to draw its own wave of comments thanking him for being back in the booth.

That matters more with Hemi Super Bees than with almost any other Mopar, because the math around them is brutal: a numbers-matching 426 Hemi car can be worth several times what an otherwise identical 383 or 440 Super Bee brings at the same auction. That gap has, for decades, created an incentive to “create” Hemi cars out of lesser originals — swapping in a correct-date engine, re-stamping a block, or simply hoping nobody checks the fender tag against the VIN too closely. A documented restoration history, period magazine coverage, and a Wise Report aren’t just nice extras on a car like this one; they’re the difference between a car worth bidding on with confidence and one that invites a lawsuit a year later.

It’s also worth remembering how small the entire universe of real four-speed Hemi Super Bees actually is. With roughly 42 Hemi cars built across the whole 1970 model year split between automatic and manual transmissions, the surviving population of manual-trans cars likely numbers in the dozens worldwide — cars that have been bought, sold, restored, and occasionally wrecked over more than five decades. Every one that resurfaces at auction with solid paperwork, like this Burnt Orange example, effectively becomes a data point the entire hobby uses to sanity-check the rest of the population.

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