A George Barris-customized 1968 Dodge Dart GTS convertible spent years chasing criminals on TV’s Mannix before disappearing into obscurity and eventually turning up dilapidated in a field. Automotive reporter Dave Kunz tracked it down, confirmed it by its hidden Barris touches, and restored it to its on-screen British Racing Green with the original 340 V8 still under the hood. Jay Leno takes it for a drive to find out why this compact GTS could out-hustle flashier detective-show muscle cars of its era.
Every private eye on 1960s television needed a signature ride, but Joe Mannix’s car was built to disappear into traffic instead of standing out in it. When the show swapped Mannix into a convertible for its second season in 1968, custom-car legend George Barris got the assignment — and for once he didn’t reach for flames or gold trim. Barris wanted something “cool but subtle,” so he took a factory Dodge Dart GTS convertible, resprayed it British Racing Green, and quietly built in details no dealership Dart ever had: hidden hood scoops, Lucas Flamethrower spotlights where the parking lamps used to sit, and a reworked tail with an integrated spoiler. Actor Mike Connors drove that Dart through gravel-spraying chases for years on the CBS hit. Then the cameras stopped rolling, the car vanished from public view, and by the time anyone tracked it down again, it was sitting dilapidated in a field — one bad decision away from being scrapped as just another old Dodge.
In this episode of Jay Leno’s Garage, Leno welcomes automotive reporter Dave Kunz — the Dart’s current owner — to show off the restored car in person. Kunz didn’t just admire the show from a distance; he tracked the Dart down, verified it using Barris’s signature touches, and brought it back to its on-screen green. He and Leno dig into how the car survived, what’s original versus rebuilt, and the strange afterlife of a Hollywood stunt car once a studio stops caring about it.
Leno spends real time behind the wheel, and it shows — this is one of the more engaged test drives he’s filmed in a while. He and Kunz talk through the 1960s idea of a “hero car” built around subtlety instead of spectacle, the period-correct Motorola car phone still mounted inside the cabin, and why a compact Dart with a 340-cid V8 could out-hustle flashier detective-show machines of the era. Leno calls the Dart GTS a giant-killer in the world of compact muscle, and after watching it move, it’s not hard to see why he sticks his foot into it more than once during the drive.
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The Detective Show That Made Car Chases a Weekly Event
Mannix ran for eight seasons on CBS from 1967 to 1975, with Mike Connors playing a private investigator who solved cases the hard way — usually from behind the wheel. The show built its reputation on stunt-heavy chase sequences, and that reputation meant its hero car had to be more than a prop sitting in a driveway shot. For the second season, producers swapped Mannix’s original hardtop for a convertible, giving stunt drivers an open cockpit for the show’s signature chases and giving Barris a clean canvas to customize into something that could believably chase criminals across Los Angeles every week. It’s the kind of production detail that’s easy to miss watching reruns, but it shaped which car ended up parked in Jay Leno’s garage more than fifty years later.
George Barris’s “Cool But Subtle” Build Sheet
By 1968, Barris had already built some of Hollywood’s loudest cars — the kind of chrome-and-flame machines that turned heads on sight. For Mannix, he deliberately went the other direction. The Dart kept its stock proportions and clean lines, but Barris hid the personality in the details: Lucas Flamethrower spotlights swapped in where the factory parking lamps sat, a reworked rear end with an integrated spoiler and new taillights, and a Motorola car phone bolted inside the cabin — genuinely futuristic hardware for a network drama in 1968. The idea was a detective’s car that looked ordinary enough to tail a suspect without being made, but could still handle the chase once things went loud. Underneath, the GTS came with real teeth: a 340-cid small-block V8 rated at 275 horsepower and 340 lb-ft of torque, paired to a TorqueFlite automatic, in a car that weighed a few hundred pounds less than the big-block Chargers and Challengers filling Dodge showrooms that same year.
From a Dilapidated Field Find to Racing Green Again
After Mannix ended its run, the Dart didn’t get a museum retirement — it disappeared into private hands and, eventually, obscurity. Accounts of its rediscovery describe a car left outdoors to deteriorate for years, identified only because Barris’s modifications were still visible underneath the neglect: the shape of the spotlight housings, the reworked tail, the telltale integrated spoiler that no stock Dart ever wore. Once the car was confirmed, it went through a full restoration back to its on-screen green, and today it still runs the original-spec 340 V8 and TorqueFlite combination that powered it through Mannix’s weekly chases decades ago.
What makes the story land isn’t just the survival — it’s the reunion. After the restoration, the Dart was brought back together with both Mike Connors and George Barris themselves, closing the loop on a car that had spent decades as little more than a rumor among Mopar collectors. People who worked on or previously owned the car have chimed in with their own details since, including corrections about which brake options were actually factory-available on V8 Darts and notes on how the exhaust sounds different in person than it does with a microphone parked a few feet from the tailpipes. That kind of ongoing documentation, contributed by the people who actually know the car, is rare for any TV survivor, let alone one that spent years quietly rotting in a field before anyone realized what they were looking at.
Why the 1968 Dart GTS Still Matters to Mopar Collectors
The Dart GTS never got the marketing push that Chargers and Challengers did, and that’s exactly why cars like this one matter to collectors today. It was Dodge’s answer for buyers who wanted real performance without the size, weight, and price of a big-block intermediate — a genuine giant-killer built on a compact platform, and one that could still be optioned with enough presence to headline a network TV show without looking out of place next to it. Surviving GTS convertibles are scarce on their own; a documented, Barris-built, television-famous example is close to one of one. For anyone chasing Mopar history rather than just horsepower numbers, the Mannix Dart is close to the whole package: a real muscle car pedigree wrapped around a piece of Hollywood’s golden age of car chases, verified by the man who built it and driven, decades later, by one of television’s own car guys.
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