 |
This 1970 Dodge Charger R/T pairs the 426 Hemi with a rare EB3 Light Blue Metallic and black vinyl top combination — one of just 56 Hemi Chargers built with an automatic transmission that year. Read on to find out why so few buyers said yes to the Hemi’s steep price tag, and how the engine paid off on Dodge’s most successful NASCAR season yet.
Oldsmobile built its single best muscle car in 1970, and the 442 W-30 has never been matched by anything the brand made afterward. Between an owner still driving his thirty years later and a family’s own Hurst-shifted Holiday Coupe, the stories behind this car go well beyond a spec sheet. Watch to see exactly what earned the 442 W-30 its “never bested” reputation.
George was not hunting for a classic when he spotted a Buick Skylark with a for-sale sign in Lisbon, Ohio, in the summer of 2014; he just stopped for a closer look. What he found was a GS455-powered GSX tribute car with its original numbers-matching 350 engine stored safely away, parked in a garage alongside a small private muscle car collection. Read on to find out about the one-of-a-kind GM production mistake that makes a factory GS455 Stage I Skylark one of the rarest muscle cars of 1970.
Beyond the well-known bargains, plenty of affordable muscle car ownership still hides in plain sight. Cars like the Chevrolet Nova, Dodge Dart Sport, and Buick Skylark deliver real small-block performance for a fraction of what a comparable Camaro or Mustang costs. The simple reason: fewer buyers chase these badges, which keeps demand, and prices, refreshingly low.
Mercury built more than ten thousand Cyclone GT hardtops for 1970, but only a few hundred of them left the factory with the engine that made the model’s reputation. Three different 429s were available, ranging from a smooth cruiser to a solid-lifter drag car, and a well-restored example tells you almost nothing about which one you are looking at until you check. Here is how to read a 1970 Cyclone GT, and why the Drag Pack cars are the ones worth chasing.
When longtime dealer Bob Taylor retired after 37 years running his own classic car shop, he didn’t just sell off the inventory — he mentored his successor into building a new showroom nearby. The result is a 6,500-square-foot space in El Paso that feels, by Taylor’s own admission, eerily similar to the shop he just closed. Read on for the story behind the handoff.
The 1970 Plymouth Hemi ‘Cuda convertible is the rarest and most valuable muscle car most enthusiasts will never see in person — only 14 were ever built. Back in period, buyers largely ignored it, put off by insurance costs and a price tag that made little sense for a mid-size car. Decades later, that same scarcity has pushed individual examples toward eight-figure sales. Read on to find out how a commercial failure became the most expensive muscle car in the world.
1970 was the last model year before a looming federal fuel mandate forced every automaker to detune their engines for good, and Buick used that final window to build one of the most overlooked muscle cars of the era. The GS 455 Stage 1 traded flashy branding for raw torque, putting up numbers that rivaled cars with far bigger reputations. This is the story of how the old man’s brand ended up building a genuine class leader. Watch to see why collectors are still catching up to it.
A downtown food break turned into an impromptu grudge race when a Honda Civic owner bragging about his stripped, “tuned” 2.2-liter engine challenged two friends cruising their vintage Dodge Chargers — including a bone-stock 1970 model driven by someone who had never raced before. What followed split viewers into two camps and reignited an argument that’s never really settled. Watch to see how it played out.
Ford built this Boss 302 Mustang to satisfy SCCA Trans-Am homologation rules, which required at least 6,500 production copies before the race car could compete. Ford ended up building 7,014 for 1970, exceeding the quota by 514 cars, each carrying a fortified 302-cubic-inch V8 making 290 horsepower and a suspension tuned for road-course duty. Period road tests clocked the quarter mile in 14.9 seconds at 93.4 mph. Ford dropped the model after just two years on the market.
Oldsmobile reshaped the 1970 Cutlass Supreme around comfort and style rather than raw muscle car numbers — but buried in the order sheet was an option code that turned this luxury coupe into something considerably faster than its badge suggested. Most buyers never checked that box, which is exactly what makes finding one today interesting.
By 1973, insurance surcharges, emissions rules, and new bumper regulations had already reshaped the muscle car era that once defined Plymouth’s Barracuda. The E-body soldiered on regardless, sharing its platform with the Dodge Challenger. Production numbers from this final full season tell a quieter, less celebrated story than the Hemi-powered years that usually get the attention.
Chevrolet rated the 1970 Chevelle SS 454’s LS6 engine at 450 horsepower, but nobody who dyno-tested one believed the number — Super Chevy Magazine’s own testing pointed to something closer to 500. It was the most powerful engine Chevrolet ever put in a Chevelle, offered for exactly one year before EPA rules ended the experiment. Only 4,475 LS6 Chevelles were built in 1970, and just 137 are verified on today’s national registry. Read on for what made this one-year-only big block so different from every 454 that came after it.
A split-bumper Camaro Z28, a 429-powered Mustang Mach 1, and a Pontiac Firebird Trans Am — all rusting together in a Japanese field, thousands of miles from where any of them were built. Car-spotting channel WasabiCars found the yard first; Jalopnik later called it Japan’s random muscle car graveyard. Viewers in the comments don’t just identify the cars, they mourn them, with more than one person floating the idea of shipping the whole lot home. Watch to see exactly what’s been left to rust.