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Jay Leno owns hundreds of cars, but few tell a story as understated as his 1966 Dodge Coronet, a boxy family coupe hiding one of the most feared engines Detroit ever sold to the public. That small “426 Hemi” fender badge marks the first model year Chrysler offered the Hemi as a genuine street engine rather than a race-only exotic, sold in just three B-body nameplates. Read on to find out why a car this plain-looking still commands serious respect from collectors like Leno.
Dodge hid its rarest 1968 big-block under the skin of its cheapest compact, and only 991 buyers ever got the 383-and-four-speed combination. Jay Leno tracked one down for his own personal collection, not a guest’s car passing through. Here’s why a plain-looking Dart could out-run muscle cars twice its size.
The Cougar Eliminator replaced the Cougar GT on April 1, 1969, and just 302 of the 2,250 built left the factory with a 428 Cobra Jet under the scoop. Jay Leno spends an afternoon with one of the survivors — a big-block pony car with a genuine Trans-Am pedigree and a 335-horsepower rating almost nobody believes.
Jay Leno and Donald Osborne take out an Oldsmobile 442 that Audrain’s own team describes as a wolf in a businessman’s clothing, hiding a four-barrel 400 cubic inch V8 and four-speed manual behind restrained black-on-black styling. Viewers flooded the comments recalling their own 442s, bought cheap decades ago as used cars rather than collectibles. More than one called it the most underrated muscle car of its era. Watch the full drive to see why.
Jay Leno takes the wheel of a 1979 Pontiac Trans Am on loan from the Audrain Automobile Museum — the same black-and-gold decal car most people know from the movies, but with a mechanical story that’s easy to miss. According to fans in the comments, this was the year Pontiac’s W72 400 actually out-accelerated the Corvette. Watch Leno find out if the reputation holds up.
Jay Leno rides shotgun in the legendary Hemi Under Glass, a 2,500-horsepower exhibition car built to run an entire quarter mile balanced on its rear wheels, driven by veteran stunt driver Bob Riggle. Even with decades of automotive experience, Leno’s reaction on camera makes clear this ride is unlike anything else in his garage. Watch to see how a car engineered to defy physics actually feels from the passenger seat.
Robert Lamb’s Dodge Charger SRT Hellcat just became the first of its kind to run a 9-second quarter mile on pump gas — no race fuel, no built engine, just a smart bolt-on parts list and a dialed-in tune. His 9.993-second pass at 137.89 mph came from a car he drives every day, not a dedicated race build. Read on to find out exactly what it took to break a barrier Hellcat owners have been chasing for years.
Jay Leno had one thing left on his automotive bucket list: a ride in the Hurst Hemi Under Glass with legendary stunt driver Bob Riggle at the controls. What happened on that run turned a routine exhibition into one of the most-watched clips in Jay Leno’s Garage history, with nearly eight million views and a comment section full of people who could not believe what they had just watched. Watch the video and see for yourself.
Barrett-Jackson’s 46th Annual Scottsdale Auction rolled a deep run of rare Mopars across the block in January 2017, and one lot in particular had the rest of the docket looking over its shoulder: a 1970 Plymouth Hemi ‘Cuda listed as one of only fourteen built, carrying documented race history and national records. Here is what made that car, and the Mopar run around it, worth paying attention to.
Chrysler built so few Hemi powered E-body convertibles that commonly cited production figures put the entire two-year total at roughly two dozen cars worldwide. Bob Ashton spent nearly a full year on the phone with Mopar collectors trying to get 27 of them into one room at the Muscle Car And Corvette Nationals in Rosemont, Illinois. Read on for why that gathering may never be repeated, and what makes these particular cars so nearly impossible to assemble.
Appraiser Donald Osborne, who moonlights as an opera singer, sat down with Jay Leno to settle a debate between three cars that each inspired a hit song, including the 1952 Lincoln Capri immortalized in “Hot Rod Lincoln.” Only one of those three cars turned its musical fame into real collector-market gains. Nostalgia and rarity don’t always move together, and this roundup only proves it further with dispatches from a London concours and a Chicago muscle car show. Here’s what actually separates a beloved song car from a valuable one.
Jay Leno’s roughly 180-car collection includes American muscle he actually drives and maintains himself, while Ralph Lauren takes the opposite approach with a smaller collection reportedly worth hundreds of millions. Paul Walker owned more than 30 cars before his death, and ZZ Top’s Billy Gibbons turned his obsession into a published book. Read on for why collectors who could own literally anything else keep coming back to American muscle.
The Pontiac GTO sits near the top of any credible list of great muscle cars, and its most theatrical variant took its name from a comedian’s catchphrase on a late-1960s sketch show. The particular 1970 Judge that ended up in Jay Leno’s garage carries a 366-horsepower engine, a four-speed, a hood-mounted tachometer, and an owner who runs one of the biggest names in classic tire manufacturing. The naming story alone is worth the detour.