Dodge Coronet 1966 500 426 Hemi

Dodge built the 426 Street Hemi to satisfy NASCAR’s homologation rules, then quietly offered the same race-bred engine in showroom Coronets, and buyers who checked that option box created one of the rarest muscle cars of 1966. Estimates on exact Coronet 500 Hemi production vary by source, but all of them land in the low hundreds, with four-speed manual cars rarer still. A low-mileage survivor like this one is the kind of find collectors spend years chasing.

1966 Dodge Cornet 500 that came factory equipped with the 426 Hemi V-8 engine. Not many of these were built, and this is a great example of a low mileage version!! You like it?

Somewhere in the neighborhood of a few hundred cars, and depending which source you trust, it might be fewer than 150, Dodge built a Coronet 500 in 1966 that could out-drag nearly anything else on the street, using an engine so potent it was originally built for NASCAR. Finding one today is the automotive equivalent of a lottery ticket that already paid out for whoever’s garage it is sitting in. Add in that this particular example carries unusually low mileage, and you are looking at a car that spent most of its life more preserved than driven. Numbers this small do not leave much room for guessing wrong about what you are looking at.

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An Engine Built for NASCAR, Sold to the Street

Dodge introduced the 426 Street Hemi for 1966 to satisfy NASCAR homologation requirements, then offered the race-derived 425-horsepower V8 as a factory option on select street cars. Across the entire model year, only 2,714 Street Hemi cars were built in total, and just 1,168 of those went into Dodge products. Of that already small number, only 740 Coronets received the 426 Hemi, with roughly half wearing range-topping Coronet 500 trim.

How Rare Is Rare?

Exact production figures for the Coronet 500 Hemi vary depending on the source, with counts for the four-speed manual version landing in the low hundreds. The convertible body style is rarest of all, with only 27 built across both transmissions, split between 15 manuals and 12 automatics. Against that backdrop, a documented, low-mileage Coronet 500 Hemi like this one represents an exceptionally rare survivor of Dodge’s brief factory-Hemi era.

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