1969 Dodge Dart Swinger 340: The Budget Bomb That Outsold the GTS

Car Life opened its January 1969 road test with a line about relatives: "Family feuds are the fiercest kind." The feud was inside Chrysler. Dodge and Plymouth sat in different places on the corporate chart, the magazine explained, but in the showroom they fought each other. The Road Runner's feathers were barely dry when the Super Bee arrived; the Formula S Barracuda competed with the Dart GTS; and for 1969 Plymouth had the 'Cuda 340, a pocket Road Runner. Dodge, Car Life said, had countered with the Swinger. When divisions of one corporation compete, the writers added, the buyer is the winner. The Swinger 340 was built to prove it.¹

Car Life called the Swinger a "budget-semi-Supercar": a compact with a factory-tweaked mid-range engine and a stiffened suspension, without the accessories that usually ran the price up. It did not come in a plain wrapper. Appearance-only hood vents, stripes around the rear deck and low-restriction dual exhausts let it be identified from blocks away. Over-Drive's fact sheet describes it as the high-performance version of the base Swinger two-door hardtop, itself the replacement for the base Dart two-door, with a rally suspension, power-bulge hood, bumblebee stripe and wide-oval tires. The interior stayed spartan: a bench seat and a rubber floor mat instead of carpet.^1,2

The engine was the whole argument. The 340 four-barrel, with a 4.04-inch bore, 3.31-inch stroke and 10.5:1 compression, was rated at 275 horsepower at 5,000 rpm and 340 lb-ft at 3,200, the same figures in Car Life's data panel and Over-Drive's engine table, neither of which names the rating basis. The magazine was more interested in how it felt. "The 340 is more than responsive, it's eager," Car Life wrote, adding that it had been designed as a performance engine from the start rather than an economy engine with a hot cam bolted on. The 383 was not offered in the Swinger, and the magazine thought that was just as well.^1,2

The price was the other half. Car Life's data panel gives a list price of $2,857 FOB factory, and its test car came to $3,470 with front disc brakes at $50.15, power brakes at $42.95, an automatic transmission at $29.35, a radio group that included power steering at $196.85, a vinyl roof at $77.25 and Polyglas tires at $31.60. The sources disagree about the gearbox. Car Life describes a four-speed as standard Swinger equipment, while Over-Drive's option list prices a four-speed at $188 with the 340. Neither source addresses the other, so both stand until a Dodge order guide settles it.^1,2

Car Life's test Swinger ran with the TorqueFlite, a 3.23 axle and Goodyear Polyglas D70-14 tires, which the Dodge representative had ordered but which the car first arrived without. On the standard polyester tires it spun and smoked off the line and ran the quarter-mile in the low 15s. On the belted tires it averaged 14.8 seconds at 96 mph and reached 60 mph in 6.9 seconds, at a test weight of 3,605 pounds. The magazine declined, "to avoid embarrassment," to name the more expensive performance cars it had tested that year which were slower. Fuel economy ran from 11 mpg on test to 15 on the highway.¹

The chassis matched the engine better than the brakes did. Car Life found the stiffer springs and bigger shocks well chosen, handling without harshness, and described the tester coming into a corner too fast, braking, and catching the Swinger in a controlled drift, "as nice a dirt-track attitude as you'll find this side of Nazareth, Pa." The brakes, though, rated only fair; the rear wheels locked easily. The verdict came as a staff argument. One writer, a believer in cubic inches, liked the Swinger but said it was no supercar. A small-car fan answered that the Swinger isn't a supercar: "It's just faster than a Supercar."¹

Above the Swinger sat the Dart GTS, a hardtop or convertible with all the GT features, E70-14 red-line tires, the 340 standard and the 383 optional. Over-Drive's engine table rates that 383 at 330 horsepower, though its own summary box gives the Super Bee's 335, an inconsistency the fact sheet does not resolve. New for 1969 was the E86 440, rated at 375 horsepower at 4,600 rpm and 480 lb-ft at 3,200, which Over-Drive describes as the unaltered mid-size Dodge engine; power steering was unavailable with it for lack of space. Over-Drive quotes Chrysler staff engineer Larry Shepard: "In 1969, we built over 600 440-powered Darts."²

The production figures show which Dart buyers chose. Over-Drive writes that "most accept" 16,637 Swinger 340s were delivered, and the Swinger 340 Specials compilation, which cites Galen Govier and Consumer Guide among its sources, gives the same figure; elsewhere Over-Drive's own text says 20,000 were sold, while 16,637 is the figure two sources share. The GTS came to about 6,700 cars with no breakdown by body or engine, and the 340 compilation counts 3,645 GTS 340s. On those figures the cheaper Swinger 340 outsold the entire GTS line by roughly two and a half to one. The same compilation's 1968 GTS 340 total was 5,828.^2,3

The Dart's drag-strip fame came from a different kind of car. DodgeGarage reports that 80 Super Stock Hemi Darts, coded LO23, were built in 1968, starting at Hamtramck and completed by Hurst for competition. NHRA's history of Super Stock at the U.S. Nationals says Hemi-powered factory Darts and Barracudas were a highlight at Indianapolis from 1968 on, and records that in 1970 Ron Mancini's Dart rolled over the competition there. Those were purpose-built race cars. The Swinger 340's claim was the one Car Life made for it: a car an ordinary buyer could order, drive home on a bench seat, and still embarrass pricier supercars.^4,5,1

The formula outlived the year. The Swinger 340 Specials compilation counts 13,785 Swinger 340s for 1970, and it credits Plymouth's new Duster 340 with 24,875 that year, though other references print slightly different Duster totals. The feud Car Life described had simply moved down the price ladder, where Plymouth's small-block compact now outsold Dodge's. What 1969 established, and what the production numbers confirm, is that the 340 in a plain two-door body was not a niche. It drew more buyers than Dodge's bigger-engined, better-trimmed GTS, and it did so for a list price under $2,900.^3,1,2