Year & Model?

New sheet metal, a squared-off nose, and an engine bay that ranged from a mild 318 to a rare 440 — this Road Runner belongs to a chapter of the model most casual fans skip right past. Sales actually jumped when Plymouth redesigned it, so why does this generation get so little credit today?

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Somewhere in a green paint code and a squared-off front clip is a clue that most casual fans miss entirely. The car in this photo isn’t from the Road Runner‘s famous early run — it’s from a much later chapter of the model, one built after Plymouth completely reworked the sheet metal and the car’s whole personality along with it. Production for this generation more than doubled from the year before, yet it’s one of the least discussed Road Runners among casual collectors today. The engine bay tells its own story too, with a lineup that ranged from a mild economy V8 all the way up to a 440 that only a fraction of buyers ever ordered. So: year and model — do you know it, or does the shape have you second-guessing everything you thought you knew about Road Runners?

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A Redesign That Actually Grew Sales

This is a 1973 Plymouth Road Runner, built on the Satellite platform after Plymouth gave the car completely new sheet metal and a more conventional, squared-up front end that echoed the brand’s four-door sedans. It’s a controversial-looking Road Runner among purists who prefer the swoopier 1971-72 body, but the numbers don’t lie: the redesign actually increased sales by roughly 40 percent, and Plymouth built 19,056 Road Runners for the model year, more than double the prior year‘s total. That makes the ’73 one of the more commonly found Road Runners today, even though it rarely gets the spotlight in muscle car retrospectives.

The Engine Lineup Buyers Actually Chose

Buyers stepping into a ’73 Road Runner had a real spread of engine choices, from a workmanlike 318 cubic-inch V8 making a modest 170 horsepower up to the burly 440 rated at 280 hp — though by this point emissions regulations had taken a real bite out of the big-block’s advertised output compared to just a few years earlier. Only 749 of these Road Runners left the factory with that 440 under the hood, and every one of them was paired exclusively with the 727 TorqueFlite automatic rather than a manual gearbox. That combination of rarity and a completely different body style is exactly why cars like this one tend to trip up even people who think they know their Road Runners cold.

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