Plymouth Only Built 824 Convertible Road Runners in 1970 — Then Killed the Ragtop for Good

Plymouth built only 824 convertible Road Runners for 1970 before killing the body style for good. A clean survivor hardtop, featured in a recent walk-around, carries all the same oddball 1970-only details: a licensed cartoon bird, a vacuum-actuated hood scoop, and a facelift that lasted exactly one model year.

Plymouth built the Road Runner to be the opposite of fancy — a stripped-down, back-to-basics muscle car with a cartoon bird on the fender and a horn that mimicked a Looney Tunes “beep beep.” For two model years, that same lineup also came as a drop-top. Then, after 1970, Plymouth quietly dropped the Road Runner convertible and never brought it back. Only a few hundred buyers ever got to order one in that final year, built on a body that itself only lasted a single season before a full redesign. A recent walk-around from Raiti’s Rides on a surviving 1970 hardtop is a good excuse to revisit just how fast that whole chapter came and went.

The Car in the Video

Raiti’s Rides — a channel built around unscripted, enthusiast-level looks at classic American iron — spends its latest episode circling a well-kept 1970 Road Runner, the kind of car that draws a crowd at a local cruise-in rather than a concours lawn. Viewers in the comments keep circling back to the same word: honest. No gloss-black trim, no aftermarket screens, no modern wheel package pretending to be subtle — just a car that still looks and sounds like 1970.

That reaction is part of why the Road Runner nameplate worked in the first place. Plymouth built it as a reaction against the muscle car arms race of bigger engines and higher window stickers. The Road Runner undercut its own GTX sibling by hundreds of dollars while still offering the same 440 and 426 Hemi engines, and buyers noticed. The car in this video — clean, driven, not over-restored — is a reminder that the formula still reads the same way more than five decades later.

⚑ Featured Gear

Start Car Conversations →

As an Amazon Associate I earn from qualifying purchases.

The Cartoon Bird Plymouth Paid $50,000 to Borrow

The Road Runner name wasn’t a marketing department’s idea pulled out of thin air — Plymouth licensed it directly from Warner Bros.-Seven Arts, reportedly paying around $50,000 for the rights to the Road Runner character and likeness from the Wile E. Coyote cartoons. That got Plymouth the bird decal and the name. It did not get them the sound, so the company spent roughly another $10,000 developing a horn that electronically reproduced the cartoon’s signature “beep-beep,” nicknamed internally as the “Voice of the Road Runner.” It remains one of the stranger line items in muscle car history: a car company paying a cartoon studio so a horn could sound like a bird.

Underneath the cartoon branding, the mechanical story was serious. The base 383-cubic-inch V8 was rated at 335 horsepower and 425 lb-ft of torque — punched up with cylinder heads borrowed from the big 440 to make more power than a stock 383 normally produced elsewhere in Chrysler’s lineup. Step up to the 440 and output climbed to 375 horsepower, or 390 with the triple-carburetor 440 Six Barrel setup. At the top of the order sheet sat the 426 Hemi, rated at 425 horsepower and 490 lb-ft, which for 1970 switched from solid to hydraulic lifters for better streetability and emissions behavior without giving up much at the strip.

The Hood Vent That Only Opened When You Told It To

1970 brought a facelift most Mopar fans can spot at a glance: a new loop-style front bumper wrapped around the grille, revised taillights, and the Air Grabber hood option. Contrary to the popular idea that it was purely throttle-triggered, the 1970 Air Grabber was actually controlled by the driver — a switch under the dash fired a vacuum servo that slowly lifted the forward-facing scoop into position, revealing a set of painted “shark teeth” on either side of the opening. Shut the system off, or kill the ignition, and a solenoid bled off the vacuum so a spring could snap the door closed again. It was a small piece of engineering theater, but it worked, and it’s part of why Air Grabber cars still command attention at shows.

None of this changed the Road Runner’s identity as the budget option in Plymouth’s muscle car range. It still rode on the same 116-inch-wheelbase B-body as the Satellite and GTX, still leaned on a three-speed manual as the standard transmission, and still asked buyers to check a box for the four-speed rather than assume they wanted it. That no-frills positioning is exactly why Road Runners sold in bigger numbers than flashier siblings throughout the era — and why survivors, like the one in this video, still feel approachable instead of precious.

The Rarest Road Runner Nobody Remembers

Here’s the detail most casual fans miss: 1970 was also the second and final year Plymouth offered the Road Runner as a convertible. Across the three non-Superbird body styles, Plymouth built 24,944 hardtop coupes, 15,716 pillared coupes, and just 824 convertibles — a production run so small that most Road Runner buyers that year never saw one in person. When the redesigned, more rounded 1971 Road Runner arrived, the convertible didn’t come back. The nameplate itself soldiered on for another decade, eventually riding out its final years on the Volaré platform before Plymouth retired it in 1980, but the drop-top chapter closed for good after this single, oddly short run.

That makes any clean survivor from this exact window — facelifted body, licensed cartoon bird, vacuum-actuated hood, and a model year that quietly killed off an entire body style — worth a second look. The car in Raiti’s Rides’ video isn’t the rare convertible, but it carries the same 1970-specific details that make this one model year stand apart from the Road Runners that came before and after it.

Why 1970 Was the Last Window of Its Kind

The timing of the convertible’s disappearance wasn’t random. By the early 1970s, rising insurance surcharges on high-horsepower cars, tightening federal emissions requirements, and a looming round of new safety standards were already reshaping what Detroit could profitably build. Convertibles in general were falling out of favor industry-wide heading into the decade — they were more expensive to engineer around new rollover and crash rules, and open-top sales had been softening for years as more buyers chose air conditioning over wind-in-the-hair driving. The Road Runner convertible didn’t get killed because it failed to sell; it got caught in a much larger shift that would also phase out high-compression engines and big-block options across the entire muscle car class within just a few more model years.

That context is part of why 1970 cars like the one in this video carry extra weight with collectors today. They represent the tail end of a format — full-size engines, minimal emissions equipment, a genuine convertible body on a budget muscle car — that the industry would spend the rest of the decade walking away from. A four-speed, big-block Road Runner built in 1970 is, in a very literal sense, one of the last examples of Detroit building this particular kind of car without compromise.

Watch the Full Walk-Around

Watch the full video above and let us know your thoughts in the comments. Was the 1970 facelift an improvement over the original 1968-69 Road Runner, or did Plymouth lose something when it dropped the convertible for good?