AutoTrader Find of the Week: 1970 Plymouth Road Runner is the Peak of Its Era

One of the most eye-roll-inducing, trite opinions in car culture is the proclamation that cars peaked at a certain era.

Ask anyone under 40, and they’ll tell you that cars peaked in the ‘90s. Never mind the ever-melting plastic interiors, annoying cassette decks, backwards electrical wiring (remember when a burnt-out taillight would set off your ABS light?), fogged headlights, and paper-thin paint. For Millennials, the ‘90s are the best era, a point they will intellectualize with supreme confidence and a total lack of self-awareness because of nostalgia bias.

Cars are a lot like music and fashion in that your tastes are mostly solidified by your early 20s —  and evermore you are most likely to prefer things you have the deepest sense of nostalgia for. What is clearly so subjective becomes seemingly objective because that’s just how brains work. It’s inescapable. And it happens to every generation.

Scroll through the hellish quagmire that is the Internet, and you’ll see that Gen Z is already claiming cars peaked in 2015.

My great-grandfather, I’m told, truly believed every car made post war was absolute junk. This notion seemed ridiculous to my grandfather, the absolute quintessential Baby Boomer, who firmly believes cars peaked in 1970.

It’s why he still believes that nothing could possibly be faster than a Plymouth Road Runner. Never mind that he might be a tad biased and even more nostalgic, having worked as a Chrysler/Dodge/Plymouth dealer during the muscle car heyday. Never mind that he had a personal preference for the Road Runner, having purchased a new orange 440 hardtop in 1968, then a Plum Crazy purple 383 convertible in 1969, and then a white Superbird in 1970 (apparently one of less than 50 ever shipped to Canada, a car he sold almost immediately, as he says he was embarrassed by the giant wing).

True story. Two summers ago, I had a Dodge Charger Hellcat Redeye Jailbreak loaned to me for testing — the mad cat with 808 hp — and my grandfather still insisted a 426 Hemi Road Runner would give it a run for its money. Nothing I said could convince him otherwise.

My grandfather is an annoying, stubborn old Boomer fart.

But I must admit that his admiration and nostalgia for what he considers “peak” is why even I find this sublime 1970 Road Runner 440 so appealing.

Currently listed on AutoTrader, the vehicle is for sale through Pentastic Motors in Gorrie, Ont., which specializes in classic muscle; there are mostly a lot of Mopars and Chevys.

This car’s VIN code denotes it began life as a 383 V8 car — respectable, but seldom enough for diehard Mopar muscle heads. The original engine has been replaced by a larger 440 unit, bored 30 over, topped with a six-barrel carburetor setup, and attached to an 833 four-speed manual transmission with the required pistol-grip shifter.

Translation? Cool old-school muscle car stuff. Unsophisticated, but period correct. It’s a time machine to an era of automotive engineering marked by blissful ignorance and unfiltered hooliganism.

It’s not all original, thankfully. This car has received some mild restoration with a refreshed engine bay, a new main wiring harness, and some general quality-of-life upgrades like disc brakes and power steering. However, it retains much of its original chrome sheet metal, including the floor and quarter panels.

While we can’t be certain that the paint colour is original, as Mopar VIN tags of the era don’t denote paint colour, there’s little reason to think this car began life as anything other than a Sublime Green car with Warner Bros. cartoon Road Runner side graphics.

Pentastic Motors is so confident in this old Mopar that they’ll sell it to you certified and even toss in a three-year/70,000 km powertrain warranty. This means at just under $90,000, it’s pretty comparable to the outgoing top-trim Chargers and Challengers on price (obviously, the new cars are way, way faster, Bruce).

It doesn’t really get more Boomer than a Plymouth Road Runner. An enormous slab of metal, painted bright green, festooned with cartoon characters, and housing the unnecessarily large 440 Chrysler big block V8 engine — the Road Runner represents everything this era of marketing to Baby Boomers was about.

Heck, its entire existence is just a marketing job designed to get air-headed teenagers to buy their dad’s Plymouth Satellite. If you need any more evidence of Baby Boomers’ eternal infantilization, the horn literally goes “meep meep.”

It’s childish. It’s big. It’s silly. It’s completely outdated. And those are all the reasons why you want one.

Because, while cars didn’t peak before the Second World War, or just before the gas crisis or even in the ‘90s economic boom, there are “peak” examples from each era — vessels by which you can indulge in your particular brand of nostalgia.

And by that definition, I’d submit that this Road Runner is absolutely peak.