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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.
Mercury built the Cougar on Mustang bones but dressed it up like something imported from Europe, hidden headlights and all — a formula that won Car of the Year in its debut season. By the end of the decade the car had produced two of the rarest engines in the entire pony-car family, with just two units of one configuration ever built. Read on for the numbers behind the rarity.
The 1970 Chevrolet Camaro Z28 ditched the screaming, race-homologated 302 V8 that defined its first two years for something radically different: a torquier, street-tuned LT-1 350. Some fans call it the best Z28 Chevrolet ever built; others say it lost the racing soul that made the nameplate special in the first place. Decades later, original owners are still driving these cars daily, and the argument over which engine, and which era, got it right hasn’t cooled off one bit. Watch to see the case for 1970.
The 1970 Shelby GT500 is the rarest single model year in the nameplate’s history, and the reason is one of the strangest stories in Ford’s performance past: there was never really a 1970 production run at all. Just 286 GT500s wore 1970 VINs, and they were applied to leftover 1969 cars under federal supervision. Here is how it happened, how to spot a genuine one, and why Carroll Shelby had already walked away by then.
The Plymouth Duster and the Dodge Dart shared a platform, a parts bin, and most of a drivetrain catalog, and Chrysler still managed to turn them into rivals. One arrived in 1970 with borrowed front sheet metal and outsold every expectation. The other had a three-inch-longer wheelbase, a better badge in some circles, and a name that had to be changed after complaints. Read on for what actually separates them, and which one is the smarter buy today.
1970 was the year GM finally let Oldsmobile drop its biggest engine into the Cutlass 442, after years of a corporate ban on big-block mid-size cars. The standard 455 made 365 horsepower, but the W-30 option pushed that to 370 horsepower and a sub-15-second quarter mile. See the seven Cutlass body styles offered that year and the Rocket V8 that finally gave the 442 room to breathe.
A 1967 Plymouth GTX running the legendary 426 Hemi lines up against a 1970 Dodge Challenger 440 Six Pack in this quarter mile drag race from Road Test TV — two of the rarest muscle cars Mopar ever built, going head to head. The Six Pack jumps out front early, but the Hemi has a plan for the second half of the run. One viewer’s story about his own father predicted exactly how it would end. Watch to see who takes it.
Dodge built 503 winged Chargers. Plymouth was forced to build nearly four times as many Superbirds. Both cars came out of the same NASCAR rulebook and the same wind tunnel program, yet they ended up with different noses, different wings, different interiors, and very different reputations among collectors today. One of them was measurably faster on the high banks. Read on to find out which, and why the gap was smaller than either camp admits.
General Motors spent the late 1960s capping its intermediates at 400 cubic inches. When that rule disappeared for 1970, Oldsmobile answered with a 455-powered 4-4-2 whose advertised horsepower figure was almost certainly a deliberate lie. This Gateway Classic Cars example wears the badge quietly, but the W-30 story behind it involves fiberglass hoods, red plastic fenders, and an insurance industry that was watching very closely. Read on for what Lansing was really hiding.