Posts Tagged: Super Bee
You’ve found a 1969 Dodge Super Bee for sale, and it looks like the deal of a lifetime. That hockey-stick stripe, the buzzing bee decal on the tail, maybe even a 383 Magnum rumbling under the hood – this is a genuine B-body muscle car, still priced well under its Charger and Road Runner siblings. But look closer before you commit. NHTSA has a documented rear-axle recall tied to these cars that most sellers have never heard of, let alone addressed, and the same rust-prone unibody construction that ended so many Mopars of this era in a salvage yard is still doing damage decades later. One owner’s Super Bee needed a full family restoration – years of work, a torn-down body, and a rebuild from the ground up – just to get back to factory-correct condition. Before you hand over a deposit on your own Bee, here’s what that restoration story, and the government’s own recall records, say you need to check first.
A 1967 Camaro SS and a 1970 Dodge Super Bee were built three years and one philosophy apart. One was General Motors scrambling to answer the Mustang; the other was Chrysler selling the largest possible engine in the cheapest possible package. Put them together for a fifteen-hundred-mile road trip and the differences stop being trivia and start being mechanical reality. Read on to find out what separates these two, and which one is actually the better car to point at a horizon.
Dodge built the 1969 Super Bee to be the cheap muscle car — stripped trim, no chrome flourishes, and a sticker price built to undercut the competition. But buried in the order form was an engine option serious enough to worry cars costing thousands more, one that only 1,907 buyers ever found. From the base 383 Magnum to the ultra-rare Hemi, the Super Bee proved a bargain car could still hide a genuinely dangerous engine bay. Read on to see what separated the budget Super Bees from the legends.
Long before The Dukes of Hazzard turned a 1969 Charger into the General Lee, Dodge had already built one of the best-designed muscle cars of the era, with an engine lineup broad enough to include a version most buyers never even knew existed. From a color-coded engine bay to a sunroof option only 260 buyers ever ordered, the second-generation Charger’s story is full of details even devoted fans overlook. Read on to find out what made it so special.
Chrysler built only 22 1971 Dodge Super Bees with the 426 Hemi, and only 9 of those got a 4-speed manual. Separately, just 9 known ’71 Super Bees left the factory with a power sunroof — a nearly-$500 option that mandated a full vinyl top. Whether any single car sits at the overlap of all three is a question the historical record can’t quite settle. Watch to see the numbers behind one of the rarest combinations in Mopar history.
Dodge built the A12-package 1969 Super Bee to deliver near-Hemi drag strip performance for a fraction of the Hemi’s cost — a triple-carbureted 440, a raw fiberglass hood, and, on this particular restored example, the Butterscotch color enthusiasts single out as the best A12 shade available. Fewer than two thousand were ever built. Watch to see why Mopar specialists still treat this package as a genuine engineering achievement.
A 472-cubic-inch Hemi doesn’t appear in any 1969 Dodge brochure, which makes this Super Bee’s engine bay an instant mystery. Was it a factory fluke, a stroker build, or something else entirely? Read on to find out how far Mopar builders have gone to chase more cubic inches than Chrysler ever offered from the factory.
Dodge’s Super Bee ran a full four-year spread of engine options, from a stout 383 all the way up to the legendary 426 Hemi, but the rarest combination of them all was the mid-1969 A12 Six-Pack. Only 1,907 of those 440 Six-Pack cars were built, and the Hemi option was even scarcer at just 125 units. It’s a lineup that proves not every muscle car icon needed a household name to earn its reputation.
Mike Hall listed his five-acre British Columbia property for $1.45 million in 2017 — house, shop, and more than 300 vintage cars included in one package deal. Instead of a quiet sale, the listing went viral and turned into Rust Valley Restorers, the TV show that made Hall’s ever-growing junkyard famous. Here’s how a guy who couldn’t count his own car collection ended up on television because of it.
Chrysler had a problem in 1968: the Plymouth Road Runner was selling so well that the Dodge division was watching the money go past its own showroom windows. The answer arrived at the Detroit auto show wearing a bee on its tail and carrying the lowest price tag in the Dodge lineup. Only 125 buyers ticked the one box that turned it into something else entirely. Read on to find out which one.
A 1976 Dodge Aspen R/T doesn’t look like a factory Super Bee — because in the U.S., that car never existed. Chrysler kept the nameplate alive four extra years exclusively for Mexico, grafting a Dodge front end to a Plymouth’s tail and fitting an engine American buyers couldn’t get. One grandfather-grandson build project set out to recreate it from scratch, one badge and taillight at a time.