1968 Plymouth Road Runner: A Cartoon Bird, a Stripped Coupe and a Forecast Off by 42,000 Cars

Chrysler-Plymouth expected to sell about 2,500 Road Runners at first. Ate Up With Motor's history records that grim forecast, and it records the result: 44,599 Road Runners for the 1968 model year, a figure the Over-Drive production table matches as 29,240 coupes and 15,359 hardtops. The same history adds that conservative projections limited the supply of parts, so Plymouth probably could have sold more. Few muscle cars have a cleaner measure of how badly their own makers misjudged them. The gap between 2,500 and 44,599 is the story of 1968, and it began with a magazine editor's memo.^1,2

During the 1966 model year, according to Ate Up With Motor, Car and Driver's Brock Yates drafted a memo to Chrysler-Plymouth general manager Bob Anderson proposing an econo-racer: a plain, cheap car with a big engine. Car and Driver's own January 1968 road test credits the concept to Yates as well, and then argues that Plymouth diluted it with styling gimmicks. Inside Plymouth, product planning chief Joe Sturm and analysts Jack Smith and Gordon Cherry wanted something more than an understated street racer. By Ate Up With Motor's account, they wanted an icon, and the icon came from Saturday morning television.^1,3

Gordon Cherry, the history says, had the idea while watching cartoons with his young children: a tie-in with Warner Brothers' Road Runner. A $50,000 deal secured the rights to the Road Runner and Coyote characters, and engineering reworked the Belvedere horn to approximate the cartoon's beep-beep. The two accounts of the money do not quite match. Ate Up With Motor attaches the $50,000 to the character rights, while Car and Driver reported in January 1968 that Plymouth paid about $50,000 to capture the horn sound. Both are reports, and neither is a Chrysler contract, so the figure stays attached to each source's description.^1,3

The mechanical recipe was simpler than the marketing. The Road Runner rode Plymouth's 116-inch intermediate platform as a two-door coupe, body RM21, and a two-door hardtop, RM23. Its standard engine was a Road Runner-only 383 four-barrel rated 335 horsepower at 5,200 rpm and 425 lb-ft, a gross rating. Car Life and Car and Driver both describe it as using the 440 Super Commando's heads, camshaft and intake parts. A four-speed manual was standard, with a heavy-duty TorqueFlite as the only transmission option, and the only optional engine was the 426 Hemi at $714. There was nothing in between.^2,4,3

Price was the weapon. The coupe listed at $2,870, which Ate Up With Motor says was a little above Yates's target but $231 under a base Pontiac GTO hardtop and $559 under an equivalent Plymouth GTX. The hardtop listed at $3,034. The history says the hardtop arrived later in the year, and Plymouth issued a separate sales sheet introducing the Road Runner hardtop as an addition to the 1968 line. The standard tire was an F70x14, and the shipping weights were 3,405 pounds for the coupe and 3,400 for the hardtop, factory figures rather than scale readings.^1,2

The option sheet showed how quickly a stripper could stop being one. Car and Driver's test coupe started at $2,870 and left at $3,753.40 as tested. Its extras included an $87.50 axle group with a heavy-duty 3.55 ring and pinion, limited slip, heavy-duty radiator and viscous fan, $72.95 front disc brakes and a $17.55 flat-black hood finish. Across the Belvedere range, air conditioning was listed at $355, power steering at $94, power brakes at $44 and a tachometer at $51. The Sure-Grip axle for the Road Runner and GTX was listed at $146, and the list stayed long for a car sold on simplicity.^3,2

The magazines measured two different Road Runners, and the numbers stay with their cars. Car and Driver's 383 four-speed coupe with the 3.55 axle weighed 3,843 pounds as tested, reached 60 mph in 7.1 seconds on the best of four runs, and ran the quarter-mile in 15.0 seconds at 96 mph. It stopped from 80 mph in 242 feet, at 0.88 g, with the optional front discs fitted, and saw 114 mph. Car Life's TorqueFlite car with a 3.23 Sure-Grip axle weighed 4,020 pounds with two aboard, reached 60 in 7.3 seconds, ran 15.37 seconds at 91.4 mph and reached 122 mph at 5,200 rpm.^3,4

Those figures made the case that mattered. Neither car was a Hemi, and neither was dressed up, yet both ran mid-15-second quarter-miles or better at a list price under $3,100. Car Life's automatic car cost $3,637 as tested, less than Car and Driver's four-speed car, and gave up only a fraction of a second. For a buyer weighing a GTO, the Plymouth coupe started $231 lower. No production count for the Hemi or the TorqueFlite in 1968 has been found in an accessible documented source, so how many buyers took the bigger engine or the automatic remains unknown.^4,3,1,2

Even the headline number carries a small dispute. The Over-Drive table counts 29,240 coupes; MuscleCarClub's year-by-year table prints 28,978, while both agree on 15,359 hardtops, and neither names the underlying record. Until a factory ledger surfaces, the coupe count is best read as 29,240 in one table and 28,978 in the other. The model total of 44,599 comes from the Over-Drive table and from Ate Up With Motor's history. Paint, too, stays open: the fact sheet lists twenty-one colors from Buffed Silver to Sierra Tan, including Turbine Bronze and Electric Blue, but no documented count by color has been found for any of them.^2,5,1

The first-year success set the pattern for everything that followed. Ate Up With Motor records that Plymouth expanded the line for 1969 with a convertible, the Air Grabber hood scoop and a 440 option, and that Motor Trend named the Road Runner its 1969 Car of the Year. The bird on the door and the beep-beep horn outlasted the argument over whether they diluted Yates's idea. What Plymouth had proved in 1968 was narrower and more useful: that a plain intermediate with a strong standard engine and a low price could find tens of thousands of buyers the company itself had not expected.^1,3,2