 |
Chrysler built roughly 738 Hemi Coronets across the entire 1966 lineup, and this one carries a combination rare enough that plenty of lifelong Mopar guys have never seen one in person. Under unassuming sheet metal sits a genuine numbers-matching 426 Street Hemi and four-speed, a pairing that cost the original buyer nearly a thousand dollars and scared off almost everyone else. Read on to find out just how thin that production number really gets.
Take a genuine 1968 Dodge Coronet, strip off the rear wheels, and bolt on a pair of snowmobile tracks, and you get a machine that shouldn’t work but somehow does. This half-track conversion trades quarter-mile bragging rights for the ability to plow through drifts most trucks wouldn’t attempt, built by a hobbyist working almost entirely from scratch. Half-track conversions have a strange, scattered history in American car culture — finding one wearing a genuine muscle car body is rarer still. Read on to find out what makes this build so unusual.
This 1966 Dodge Coronet 500 pairs deep black paint with the rarest option Dodge offered that year: the 426 Street Hemi, ordered by just 136 of 55,700 Coronet 500 buyers. Behind the badges sits a story of NASCAR bans, a $907.60 option box, and a factory clutch upgrade needed just to handle the torque. Read on for what made this car so hard to order in period, and what it takes to prove one is genuine today.
This 1969 Dodge Coronet Super Bee carries the rare A12 package, a 463-dollar option that swapped in a 440-cubic-inch V8 wearing three two-barrel carburetors for one strange mid-year run. Only 1,907 were built before Dodge moved on. Stock, these cars ran mid-13-second quarter miles, embarrassing plenty of pricier machinery on the strip.
This 1966 Dodge Coronet 500 carries the 426 Street Hemi in its earliest, sharpest form – a solid-lifter cam Mopar would trade for a milder hydraulic unit by 1970. Owner Ray DuPuis brought the car to the Muscle Car and Corvette Nationals in Rosemont, Illinois, and walked through exactly what separates an early Hemi from the ones that followed. Longtime Mopar owners in the comments call this the best version Chrysler ever built. Watch to hear the case for why.
Chrysler built roughly 9,137 street Hemi cars between 1966 and 1971, and only a sliver of them left the factory as convertibles. The 1970 Dodge Coronet R/T Hemi convertible is widely considered the rarest of the bunch at just two built, with Hagerty pegging a top example near $1.3 million. A numbers-matching 1971 Hemi ‘Cuda convertible brought $3.5 million at Mecum in 2014. Read on for why the drop-tops are so scarce and what separates a real one from a clone.
Dodge invented the Super Bee by taking everything expensive out of a Coronet and leaving everything fast, then spent 1969 escalating the engine list until a 426 Hemi was sitting on the order form. Buried inside that model year was a package aimed at drag racers that Dodge barely advertised. This Gateway Classic Cars gallery captures the result. Read on for the option code that separates a good Super Bee from a great one.
Joe Massucco Jr.’s 1966 Dodge Coronet 440 is, by his own description, as stock as they come — drum brakes, 14-inch steel wheels on bias-ply tires, and a bench seat, with nothing added since it left the factory. Found at a local car show, the car reminds Massucco of a getaway car from a low-budget 1970s movie, and The Drive’s BIG MUSCLE series uses it to make the case that originality alone can be the whole story. Watch to see why leaving a car completely alone can be the boldest choice of all.
Dodge built just 740 Coronets with the 426 Hemi for 1966, roughly half of them in range-topping Coronet 500 trim, out of only 2,714 Street Hemi cars built across the entire industry that year. The engine existed for one reason: NASCAR homologation demanded Dodge sell a street version of its race motor. This documented low-mileage example is one that survived being used the way most of them were. Read on for how rare a Coronet 500 Hemi actually is.