Dodge Super-Bee 1968 to 1970

Chrysler had a problem in 1968: the Plymouth Road Runner was selling so well that the Dodge division was watching the money go past its own showroom windows. The answer arrived at the Detroit auto show wearing a bee on its tail and carrying the lowest price tag in the Dodge lineup. Only 125 buyers ticked the one box that turned it into something else entirely. Read on to find out which one.

Somewhere in Chrysler’s 1967 sales figures there was a number that made the Dodge division deeply uncomfortable. It was not a competitor’s number. It belonged to Plymouth, one hallway over, and it belonged to a stripped-down, cartoon-badged intermediate called the Road Runner that was selling faster than anyone had modeled. Corporate’s response was not to celebrate. It was to decide that the model needed competition — from inside the company. What Dodge unveiled at the Detroit auto show in 1968 looked, from twenty feet away, remarkably like the car it was built to fight. Look closer and the differences are small, deliberate, and in a couple of cases worth a great deal of money today.

Built to Compete With the Car Next Door

The Super Bee became the lowest-priced vehicle Dodge offered, and that was the entire point. Plymouth had proven there was a buyer who wanted a big engine, a heavy-duty chassis and almost nothing else, and who would happily trade carpet and chrome for cubic inches. Dodge had no equivalent product and no time to develop one from scratch, so the Super Bee was styled along the same lines as the Road Runner and aimed at the same wallet. It was Chrysler competing with itself on purpose, on the theory that a customer lost to Plymouth was better than a customer lost to Pontiac.

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Sixty-Five Pounds and One Inch of Separation

The physical differences between the two cars are almost comically small. The Super Bee is roughly 29 kilograms — about 65 pounds — heavier, and it rides on a wheelbase of 300 centimeters, or 117 inches, against the Road Runner’s 290 centimeters and 116 inches. One inch and sixty-five pounds is the entire mechanical argument. Visually Dodge worked harder: larger wheel openings, a more elaborate grille, and at the rear the Bee stripe wrapped around ornate tail lights that no Plymouth ever wore.

Three Chrome Medallions and a Charger’s Dashboard

The cleanest identifier is the badging. The Super Bee carries three die-cast, chrome-plated logo medallions — one at the rear and two up front — and that arrangement is the fastest way to separate a genuine Bee from a hopeful Road Runner at a show field. Inside, Dodge did the buyer a real favor: the instrument cluster and gauges are similar to the Charger’s, which means a car sold as the cheapest thing on the lot came with a dashboard borrowed from the division’s halo product. Underneath sat heavy-duty suspension on high-performance tires, with the Bee logo and racing stripe defining the tail section.

The 383 Magnum Was Only the Starting Point

For 1968 the Super Bee came in coupe body style only. The base engine was the 383 Magnum, a big-block rated at 335 horsepower — 250 kilowatts — which in most model lineups would be the top of the range rather than the entry point. It came standard with the Mopar A-833 four-speed, floor-mounted behind a Hurst Competition-Plus shift stick and Hurst linkage, with a TorqueFlite automatic available instead. And for 1968 that was the entire menu below the top of the page — no 440 of any description was offered in the Super Bee that first year, which left exactly one way to go faster.

125 Hemis, and the Math That Explains Them

And then there was the 426 Hemi, rated at 425 horsepower or 317 kilowatts, which is where the Super Bee stops being a budget car and starts being a collector conversation. Exactly 125 of the Hemi engines were sold in 1968. That number tells you everything about how the option was priced and who it was aimed at: a buyer walking into a Dodge showroom looking for the cheapest fast car in the building was, almost by definition, not the buyer writing a check for the most expensive engine Chrysler made. The two ideas were at war on the same order form, and the order form won.

1969: Air Induction, and an Insurance Bill Nobody Saw Coming

For 1969 Dodge added a hardtop alongside the coupe and offered a functional twin-scoop air induction system mounted on the hood — genuinely functional, not decorative, which was becoming a meaningful distinction across Detroit. The base engine remained the high-performance 383, with two optional steps up: a 440 running three two-barrel carburetors, marketed as the Six-Pack, and the 426 Hemi at the top. This was also the year the insurance industry got serious about muscle cars, loading big-displacement, high-compression coupes with surcharges that priced a lot of young buyers straight out of the showroom, and the effect was immediate. Sales fell in 1969 and kept sliding into 1970.

Bumble Bee Wings and the Pistol Grip

The 1970 Super Bee answered with cosmetics. The twin-loop front bumper Dodge christened bumble bee wings gave the car a face nobody could confuse with anything else, and an optional C-stripe offered a variation on the bumble bee stripe across the trunk lid. Inside came high-back bucket seats, a column-mounted ignition switch, and a pistol grip shifter handle on the optional four-speed that remains one of the great tactile details of the era. The second-generation Bee posted a slight sales increase over the first, but only 36 units left with the 426 Hemi — 32 hardtops plus a handful of pillared coupes — down from 125.

The 340 Nobody Bought, and the Name That Came Back

1971 — the Super Bee’s last year, after the nameplate moved onto the Charger body — was the only time the car could be ordered with a small-block, the 340 cubic inch or 5.6 liter, producing 275 horsepower and 205 kilowatts. Just 307 were built. In a car defined entirely by big-block credibility, a light, revvy, genuinely well-balanced small-block turned out to be an answer to a question almost nobody was asking, which is exactly why those 307 cars are so interesting now. The Hemi option was shelved after 1971 and did not reappear until the name itself came back on the 2007 Super Bee — nearly four decades later, on a car that would have been unrecognizable to anyone standing in that Detroit auto show hall in 1968, and yet carried the same three letters and the same insect on the tail.

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