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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.
Before Mopar’s High-Impact color names became legend, a handful of green paint codes only existed for a single model year, vivid enough to earn nicknames like Sublime and Sassy Grass. This piece traces where those shades came from, why some vanished within twelve months, and how a traffic-light-inspired green ended up on some of the boldest muscle cars of 1969 and 1970.
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.
This showroom shot of a polished orange muscle car taps into one of Detroit biggest marketing gambles: the early-1970s high-impact color wars. Hemi Orange, Hugger Orange, and Grabber Orange all trace back to the same era of factory one-upmanship. Here is the story behind the shade that still turns heads decades later.
A Mustang, a Camaro, and a Challenger lined up together is not just a photo, it is the same argument muscle car fans have been having since the 1960s. Ford started the pony car category almost by accident in 1964, Chevy and Dodge spent decades answering back, and the rivalry between all three is still what pushes each brand to build better cars. Here is the short history behind a fight that has never actually been settled.
The idea that any muscle car is a guaranteed investment has been repeated for two decades, and it is not so much wrong as badly out of date. Median auction prices have slipped to their lowest point since 2020 even while specific models keep climbing hard. The gap between those two facts is where buyers get hurt. Read on for what the numbers actually show and which attributes still hold value.
One collector’s storage facility in rural Indiana holds 53 muscle cars, starting from a single 1968 Plymouth GTX Hemi that grew into a lineup spanning a Superbird, a Shelby GT500, and a 1969 Indy 500 pace car. The rarest find is a Dodge Viper GTS-R 1:33 edition, one of only 33 ever built. Here is what’s parked inside Joey’s Garage and how a modest collection turned into something closer to a private museum.
V8TV dug through 1970’s own magazine road tests to rank the ten quickest muscle cars of the year, using the era’s published numbers rather than modern dyno figures. The order does not always favor the biggest engine, and gearing plays a bigger role than most viewers expect. One commenter’s memory of his father’s 1970 Chevelle SS 396 shows just how personal these numbers still are. Watch to see which cars made the cut.
Dodge arrived at the pony car party six years late and compensated by offering more engines than anyone else, from a 383 all the way to the 426 Hemi. The Challenger R/T was the sharp end of that lineup, and the cars that stayed with one family instead of getting flipped or raced into the ground are now the ones collectors chase hardest. Read on for what made the first-generation car special.