1968 Dodge Coronet R/T and Super Bee: Dodge Answers the Road Runner

Plymouth started the argument and Dodge had to finish it. The Super Bee Registry's history of the car records that Dodge launched the Super Bee in the spring of 1968 as its response to Plymouth's Road Runner. The Dodge was built on the redesigned Coronet pillared coupe and, by the registry history's figures, listed at $3,027, about $130 more than the Plymouth. That small premium says a good deal about the car. Dodge had the same body, the same engines and the same idea available across the corporation, and sold its version for a little more, with bumblebee stripes around the tail.¹

The Super Bee did not arrive in an empty showroom. Dodge already had a performance Coronet in the R/T, which Langworth's buyer's guide dates from 1967 with an estimated 10,000 built that first year. For 1968 the R/T came as a two-door hardtop and a convertible, with the 440 Magnum as its standard engine and the 426 Hemi as the option above it. The two cars were aimed at different buyers. The R/T was the big-block Coronet hardtop or convertible; the Super Bee was the lower-priced pillared coupe with a 383. Dodge now had two performance intermediates on one body, and the production figures show both found a market.^2,3,4

The R/T had the full year and the bigger number. Langworth and Mueller both give 10,849 Coronet R/Ts for 1968, and Mueller and Glatch's later book repeats it. Mueller's table then lists 9,734 hardtops with the 440 and 219 with the Hemi, and 519 convertibles with the 440 and just 9 with the Hemi. Those four rows add up to 10,481, which is 368 cars short of the total printed beside them. The difference is not explained, so the rows cannot be treated as a complete breakdown and the missing 368 cannot be assigned to any engine or body. What the rows do show clearly is proportion: the 440 hardtop was the Coronet R/T, and a Hemi convertible was one of the rarest Dodges of the year.^2,3,5

The Super Bee's specification was simple by design. The registry history gives it a standard 383 rated at 335 bhp, a four-speed with a Hurst Competition-Plus shifter, a Rallye gauge package and bumblebee stripes circling the tail. The Hemi was on the list for about $1,000 more. That price put a racing engine within reach of a budget buyer on paper and well beyond most of them in practice: at the registry's figures, the Hemi option alone added roughly a third to the price of the car. As the production table shows, the buyers made the 383 the Super Bee.¹

The registry's production table shows what buyers actually took home. It records 7,716 Super Bees with the 383, and Mueller's source book prints the same total, which suggests a shared lineage. Of those, 4,783 had the TorqueFlite automatic and 2,933 the four-speed, so the automatic outsold the manual by more than three to two even on Dodge's budget performance car. The Hemi went into 125 US cars, 94 automatics and 31 four-speeds, with three more exported to Canada. Together the registry's US rows come to exactly its printed 7,841 cars shipped to US dealers, and the Hemi share of that total is 1.6 percent. The registry notes that total export numbers are unknown.^4,3

The transmission split among Hemi Super Bees is the surprise. Three of every four chose the automatic: 94 of 125. In the same year, Mueller's figures for the Charger R/T show 211 of 475 Hemi buyers, 44 percent, taking the four-speed. The budget car's Hemi customers were, if anything, less interested in shifting for themselves than the buyers of the more expensive Charger. The numbers cannot say why, and no period explanation has surfaced, so the gap stands as a fact without a motive. It is a small reminder that even at the extreme end of the order form, many buyers of the Street Hemi were buying a road car with an automatic, not a drag car with a clutch.^4,3

The Super Bee also has to be seen beside its showroom neighbours. Dodge sold three big-engined intermediates on related bodies in 1968, and the separate counts sketch the whole family: Mueller's 17,584 Charger R/Ts, the 10,849 Coronet R/Ts and the registry's 7,841 US Super Bees, roughly 36,000 cars by those three different tallies. The Hemi was scarce in all of them. Mueller counts 475 Hemi Charger R/Ts; his Coronet R/T rows list 228 Hemi hardtops and convertibles; the registry records 125 US Hemi Super Bees and 3 for Canada. The Charger drew the most Hemi buyers. The Super Bee drew the fewest, in only part of a year.^3,2,4

Measured against the R/T, the Super Bee's first half-year was a success. The registry counts 7,841 Super Bees shipped to US dealers from a spring launch, against the 10,849 R/Ts that Langworth and Mueller give for the full model year. The figures come from different compilers, with different geography and accounting, so the comparison is indicative rather than exact. Even so, the cheaper car was already running at a pace that would pass the R/T within a year. The lesson of the numbers was that a performance intermediate did not need the most expensive engine or the most trim to sell; it needed a clear price and a big-block.^4,1,2

It did pass it. For 1969 the Super Bee added a hardtop to the coupe and a new 440 Six Pack option, and the registry counts 18,361 US hardtops and 8,202 US coupes. Gunnell and Langworth give the 1969 Coronet R/T 7,238. In one year the balance between Dodge's two performance Coronets had reversed, and the cheaper car was selling more than three for every R/T. The Super Bee also outlived the Coronet two-door it was born on: for 1971, when Flory records the Charger coupe and hardtop replacing the Coronet two-doors, the Super Bee moved into the Charger line. The answer to Plymouth that arrived in the spring of 1968 ended its run as a Charger.^4,6,2,7