An Ultra-Rare 1970 Hemi Coronet RT Convertible

Mark Worman’s Graveyard Carz took on a 1970 Hemi Coronet R/T convertible — one of just two Hemi convertibles Dodge built for the 1970 model year, in a four-year Hemi convertible run that totaled closer to two dozen cars than the round number sometimes quoted. The comment section turned into an oral history project, with viewers tracing the car’s ties to the Otis Chandler collection and swapping stories about neighbors who still own its rare siblings. Watch the restoration and the history that follows it.

Mark Worman has built a television career around resurrecting Mopars that most shops would call unsalvageable, but even by Graveyard Carz standards, this one stands out. A 1970 Hemi Coronet R/T convertible rolled into the shop with a rarity claim that sounds almost too specific to be true — and the comment section, filled with people who own related cars, family members of past owners, and at least one person who says a relative built this exact car decades ago, spent years afterward filling in a history the episode itself barely scratched.

A Number So Small It’s Hard to Believe

One especially detailed comment lays out the production math behind why this car is considered so rare: Dodge built just two R/T Hemi convertibles for the 1970 model year alone — and Hemi convertible production actually swung wildly across the Coronet R/T’s four-year run rather than holding steady: three in 1967, nine in 1968, ten in 1969, and two in 1970, putting the true four-year total closer to two dozen cars than the round number sometimes tossed around online. Being one of two for the 1970 model year, as the episode’s own hosts describe it, still puts this car in some of the rarest company Mopar ever built, even once the full four-year picture is accounted for.

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A Family Restoration Story From Ontario

Among the comments is a claim with real specificity behind it: a viewer says their grandfather found this exact car in a scrapyard and rebuilt it from the ground up, running a shop called A Plus Transmissions in Navan, Ontario. According to the comment, the same grandfather still owns two 1969 440 Cudas and a 1967 non-letter Coronet, and once gave a 1969 340 Cuda to his son — a family with deep roots in exactly the kind of Mopar rescue work Graveyard Carz built its entire show around.

The Otis Chandler Connection

Multiple commenters tie this specific Coronet back to the Otis Chandler collection, well known for having been assembled by the former Los Angeles Times publisher and serious vintage car collector. One viewer noted the car’s sibling — a Limelight-colored example with its original engine — was last reported in Lakeland, Florida, featured in a Mopar magazine in the 1990s after the Chandler collection was broken up, with several cars from that collection eventually landing with the Tim Wellborn collection and others sold through Mecum auctions.

A Neighborhood Full of Rare Coronets, Apparently

It’s a small detail, but a recurring one in these comment threads: multiple viewers describe rare R/T Hemi and 440-six-pack Coronets sitting in their own neighborhoods, owned by people who bought them new or acquired them decades ago and simply never sold. One commenter mentions a 1970 Coronet R/T convertible with the 440-plus-six engine and four-speed just down the block from them, owned by the same neighbor since 1971 — a reminder that some of the rarest muscle cars in America aren’t sitting in museums, they’re parked in ordinary driveways.

A Story of a Hemi Convertible Lost to Time

One of the longer comments describes a brother’s Hemi-powered Super Bee R/T convertible, purchased from someone in Montreal and reportedly built originally for the daughter of a wealthy Montreal fur family, complete with an Imperial-trimmed interior and the distinctive pistol-grip Hurst shifter. According to the comment, the car was powerful enough to lift its front wheels off the line at stoplights, before it was eventually sold and wrecked in an accident on Montreal’s Mercier Bridge — the kind of story that turns up constantly around genuinely rare Mopars, equal parts pride and loss.

Why Convertible Hemis Command Such a Premium

The rarity math here matters because convertibles were already a small percentage of any muscle car’s total production, and adding the 426 Hemi option — itself a low-volume, expensive engine choice even within Coronet R/T orders — shrinks the surviving population even further. Collectors specifically chase the convertible-plus-Hemi combination because it represents the intersection of two independently rare choices buyers rarely made together in 1970, when a Hemi convertible cost significantly more than the already-quick standard R/T package.

Graveyard Carz’s Role in Keeping These Stories Alive

Mark Worman’s shop has built its reputation specifically on Mopar restorations, and episodes like this one do double duty: they document the mechanical work of bringing a car back from rough condition, while inadvertently becoming a gathering point for exactly the kind of firsthand ownership history that would otherwise disappear with the people who lived it. The comment section on this video reads less like typical YouTube chatter and more like an oral history archive for one specific, tiny production run of Mopar convertibles.

A Car That Keeps Finding Its Own Story

Even years after the episode aired, viewers are still adding pieces to the puzzle — correcting each other’s memories, naming the actual shop that built related cars, and occasionally asking outright where the rest of a given story went. For a car this rare, that ongoing conversation may end up mattering as much as the restoration itself; provenance this specific rarely survives intact, and it’s clear from the comments that a lot of people are determined not to let it disappear.

Graveyard Carz’s Broader Mission

Mark Worman’s shop, and the television show built around it, has positioned itself specifically around saving Mopars that other restoration businesses would likely part out or scrap entirely, a mission that resonates strongly with the kind of family ownership stories this particular episode’s comment section kept surfacing. Every car the shop takes on carries the implicit message that even a rough, incomplete Mopar found in a barn or scrapyard is worth saving — a philosophy this Coronet’s own documented scrapyard origin, according to one commenter’s family history, embodies about as literally as any car the show has featured.

Velocity’s Role in Keeping Mopar History on Television

This episode originally aired on Velocity, a cable network that spent years building a dedicated audience around restoration and collector-car programming before eventually folding into the MotorTrend Network brand. That programming lineage matters because shows like Graveyard Carz depended on a network willing to commit airtime to niche, detail-heavy restoration content rather than broader general-audience programming, and it’s part of why a show built around one family’s Mopar-only shop was able to run long enough to build the kind of dedicated, historically engaged audience visible in this video’s comments.

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