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Plymouth built 2,724 AAR ‘Cudas inside a five-week window in spring 1970, purely to homologate the Trans-Am cars Dan Gurney’s team was campaigning. Each got a 340 Six Barrel with three Holley two-barrels, a functional fiberglass hood, side-exit exhaust ahead of the rear wheels, and staggered tire sizes that were an American production first. This one wears the high-impact Moulin Rouge paint. Read on for why it only lasted one year.
Road Test TV lines up one of only 182 factory-built 428 Cobra Jet Cougar Eliminator four-speeds against an equally rare 1969 Chevelle SS396 running the high-winding L78 396. It is a genuine Ford-versus-Chevy grudge match between two cars scarce enough to anchor any serious muscle car collection. Watch the full quarter-mile pass to see which rare survivor comes out ahead.
Plymouth built the Duster by taking a Valiant, keeping everything forward of the cowl, and grafting on a new fastback roofline behind it. The result cost $2,172, sold over 217,000 copies in its first year, and could be had with a 340 for about four hundred dollars more. Only a fraction of buyers checked that box, which is precisely why those cars matter now. Read on for how a parts-bin economy car became a genuine muscle car bargain.
The 1956 Buick Centurion replaced its rearview mirror with a television camera in the tail and a screen in the dashboard, at a time when television itself was still new in most American homes. It worked, and then nothing happened for thirty-five years. The gap between that Motorama show car and the backup camera in every new vehicle sold today is one of the longest idea-to-adoption stretches in automotive history.
Ford reshaped its mid-size muscle car for 1973 to meet new federal bumper rules, and the redesign paid off with a 52 percent jump in production over 1971. Buyers could choose between a humble inline-six and a deeper bench of V8 options than you’d guess, with the sportiest Gran Torino Sport reserved for V8 power only. The changes pushed the Torino ahead of its longtime rival, the Chevrolet Chevelle, in Fords ongoing battle for intermediate muscle car sales.
1970 marked the final year of high-compression muscle before emissions regulations and an unleaded fuel mandate changed everything — and this breakdown argues the real winner of that last great year came from an unexpected place. The Buick GS 455 Stage 1 quietly out-torqued nearly every rival on the market, backed up by a factory performance package most people never associated with Buick. One recent owner’s comment about a first ride with his daughter says it all.
This 1960 Ford Thunderbird sat in storage from the 1970s until 2002, then spent thirteen more years in restoration before finally starting up again at the World of Wheels show in West Allis, Wisconsin. Owner Mike Adam’s wife Lynne learned to drive on this exact car decades ago, which makes its Monte Carlo Red return to running condition a family milestone as much as an automotive one. The third-generation ‘Squarebird’ rarely gets this kind of spotlight. Watch the full engine start-up and hear the whole story.
The Dodge Challenger name has worn a lot of different cars over the decades — a 426 Hemi-powered muscle icon in 1970, a rebadged Mitsubishi import by 1978, and an 840-horsepower factory drag weapon by 2018. This video runs through all of it back to back, and the comment section reacts to every twist. Watch to see just how far one nameplate traveled.
A 1970 Hemi Cuda, one of just 652 built with the 426 that year, lines up against an even rarer 1967 Hemi Coronet R/T, one of the earliest street-legal Hemi cars Dodge ever sold. Both cars share the same legendary Elephant engine, which means this is less a brand rivalry than a family argument about which chassis and gearing made better use of it. Viewers in the comments have already nicknamed both cars the asphalt elephants. Watch the run and see which body style actually won the argument.
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.
Ford’s official records say the Boss 302 ended after 1970, which makes this surviving 1971 example something that technically shouldn’t exist. Jerry Heasley tracks down the story behind a car discovered through an eBay listing rather than any collector network, likely a factory prototype or pre-production test car. The restoration that followed only adds to its rarity. Watch to see how a car outside Ford’s own history books turned up for sale online.
A rare 425-horsepower 426 Hemi Road Runner — 1 of just 287 built in 1970 — takes on a 440 Six Pack Challenger in a quarter-mile grudge match that Mopar fans still can’t agree on decades later. Both cars sold for around $4,000 new and are now worth 20 to 40 times that. Watch to see which factory legend crosses the line first.
This vintage road test puts the 1969 AMC AMX through its paces exactly as period buyers would have seen it — no nostalgia, no hindsight, just a genuine two-seater posting a 6.3-second 0-60 time that still holds up today. Viewers can’t decide what stands out more: the numbers, the styling, or the unmistakably late-1960s marketing. Watch the full period test.
Don Dames’ 1970 Chevrolet Nova wears Green Mist paint and runs a six-cylinder rather than any of the big-block options that usually headline Nova stories. It sat in storage for years and emerged roughly 80 percent original, a survival rate that eludes almost every Nova built for straight-line speed. Read on for why the six was actually the most popular engine that year, and why honest survivors like this one are getting harder to find than restored SS cars.
This 1970 Chevrolet Impala, powered by a 350 small-block paired with a TH350 automatic, hadn’t run since 1993, 23 years of silence before this restart attempt. Using nothing more than a dwell meter, timing light, and decades of hands-on know-how, host Jonathan walks through exactly what it takes to wake up an engine everyone assumed was finished. Watch to hear how it sounds once it finally catches.