Dodge Only Built 22 Hemi Super Bees in 1971 — And Somehow One of Them Also Has a Factory Sunroof

Chrysler built only 22 1971 Dodge Super Bees with the 426 Hemi, and only 9 of those got a 4-speed manual. Separately, just 9 known ’71 Super Bees left the factory with a power sunroof — a nearly-$500 option that mandated a full vinyl top. Whether any single car sits at the overlap of all three is a question the historical record can’t quite settle. Watch to see the numbers behind one of the rarest combinations in Mopar history.

Chrysler built 5,054 Super Bees for the 1971 model year. Exactly 22 of those got the 426 Hemi. Of those 22, only 9 were bolted to a 4-speed manual instead of an automatic. And somewhere in Chrysler’s own records, completely separate from any of those Hemi numbers, sits another figure: 9 known 1971 Super Bees built with a factory power sunroof, regardless of what engine they carried. The question this particular car forces you to ask is the one Chrysler’s own build sheets can’t cleanly answer — how many cars, if any, belong to both of those groups at once.

A New Shape for ’71, Love It or Hate It

1971 brought a completely redesigned Dodge Charger platform, and with it a new Super Bee body that traded the long, sharp, boxy lines of the 1968-through-1970 cars for a curvier, more pronounced long-nose, short-deck profile. It sat about two inches shorter than its predecessor but noticeably wider, with an unusual up-swept, pillarless side window design and a fastback-leaning roofline that split opinion the moment it launched and, by most accounts, still does today. A new split-nose bumper design and hidden headlights gave this generation a distinct face from the model years that came before it, and this particular car’s Hemi Orange finish only sharpens how different the ’71 restyle reads next to its predecessors.

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425 Horsepower and a Four-Speed Stick

Buyers configuring a 1971 Charger or Super Bee could choose from a wide range of engines, but the one everyone still talks about is the 426 Hemi V8, rated at 425 horsepower and paired here with a 4-speed manual transmission rather than the more common automatic. A Hemi Orange ’71 Super Bee with the 426 and a stick sits near the top of most muscle car wish lists on specification alone, before you even get to what’s on the roof. 1971 also marked the Hemi’s final year of regular production availability before Chrysler discontinued the engine entirely, which adds a note of historical finality to any ’71 Hemi car, sunroof or not.

The Sunroof Nobody Expected on a Hemi Car

What actually sets this specific car apart isn’t the drivetrain, it’s a factory-installed power sunroof — a genuinely rare option most muscle car enthusiasts have simply never seen on a car of this era. Chrysler didn’t sell many of the roughly $500 sunroof options, and choosing it came with a catch: the option mandated a full vinyl top as well, meaning buyers couldn’t get the sunroof without also committing to the vinyl-roof aesthetic. It’s a combination that runs almost counter to how muscle cars are usually optioned, prioritizing an open-air comfort feature over the purely performance-driven checkboxes most Hemi buyers were reaching for in 1971.

What $880 and $500 Bought You in 1971

Stack the sunroof’s roughly $500 price tag on top of the 426 Hemi engine option, coded E74 and priced at over $880, and a buyer configuring this exact combination in 1971 was looking at a genuinely expensive Super Bee before even touching the rest of the options sheet. Between the two options alone, well over $1,300 sat on top of the car’s already substantial base muscle-car price.

A Cabin Built Around a 150-MPH Speedo and an 8,000-RPM Tach

Inside, the car carries a sprawling white bench-seat interior along with power windows, a 150-mph speedometer, an 8,000-rpm tachometer, and a pistol-grip shifter for working the 4-speed gearbox. A Ramcharger hood scoop feeds air down to two Carter AFB 4-barrel carburetors sitting atop the Hemi, while a Music Master AM radio rounds out a cabin built as much for long, loud highway runs as for stoplight launches.

Torsion Bars, a Dana 60, and Machine Gun Exhaust Tips

Underneath, Chrysler’s well-known torsion-bar front suspension keeps the car taut but comfortable, aided by a sway bar to control body lean in corners, with 15-inch Rally wheels and Goodyear Polyglas GT tires putting the Hemi’s 490 lb-ft of torque to the road. A Dana 60 rear axle handles that torque load, with leaf springs working to keep the axle located under hard acceleration — and the exhaust exits through the distinctive red-and-chrome tips fans nickname ‘Machine Gun tips,’ officially labeled Exhaust Bright Tips by the factory. A thin black stripe wraps around the base of the windshield on this particular car, finished off with dual painted racing mirrors, small details that round out a genuinely period-correct presentation.

22 Hemis, 9 Sunroofs, and an Overlap Nobody Can Confirm

Here’s where the numbers get genuinely uncertain: Chrysler built 5,054 total 1971 Super Bees, only 22 with the 426 Hemi, and only 9 of those 22 with a 4-speed manual rather than an automatic. Separately, only 9 known 1971 Super Bees were built with the factory power sunroof across any engine option. Whether any single car — let alone this one — sits at the intersection of the Hemi, the 4-speed, and the sunroof simultaneously isn’t something the historical record cleanly confirms, which is exactly what makes a car like this worth dwelling on rather than just admiring. Production numbers this small mean even Mopar registries and marque historians often can’t say with total certainty how many overlaps exist, since a handful of cars from this era have incomplete or lost paper trails.

The Brothers Collection and Why This Car Ended Up There

This particular Super Bee lives in the Brothers Collection, and it’s easy to see why a serious private collection would want it: a documented, ultra-low-production combination of drivetrain and factory options that may or may not have a true equal anywhere else. Whether or not another Hemi 4-speed sunroof ’71 Super Bee exists somewhere unaccounted for, this one’s combination of rarity, condition, and documentation makes it exactly the kind of car the phrase ‘muscle car of the week’ was built to showcase. Serious Mopar collections like this one tend to prioritize exactly this kind of documented, hard-to-replicate factory-options combination over raw horsepower alone, since horsepower can be recreated in a shop while a genuine factory build sheet cannot.

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