1978 Plymouth Road Runner

Plymouth's 1978 Volaré brochure restricted the Road Runner package to the coupe body and required an eight-cylinder engine to order it, tightening eligibility from the prior year. MuscleCarClub, citing the Standard Catalog of American Cars, reports just 1,357 Road Runners for 1978, a collapse from the 6,975 the same lineage carries for 1977. A new "Super Coupe" Package also arrived for the year, coupe only, layered with its own suspension, wheel, and paint content rather than folded into the Road Runner package itself.¹

The Road Runner Package itself supplied FR78x14 black-sidewall glass-belted radials, heavy-duty suspension, Rallye road wheels without trim rings, a painted grille treatment, a Road Runner decal, body-side, hood and rear tape stripes, the "beep-beep" horn, sill moulding with black paint below it, and dual remote-control racing mirrors painted and striped to match. The "Front Runner" Sport Pak, coupe only and available in black or white, required both the Road Runner package and the dual racing mirrors, adding a front air spoiler, wheel-opening flares, quarter-window louvers, a rear deck spoiler, and Road Runner tape stripes. The separate Super Coupe Package specified 15x8-inch special wheels with GR60x15 raised-white-letter Aramid-fiber radials, heavy-duty suspension with a rear sway bar, black urethane-painted bumpers, black-and-dark-red paint, flares, spoilers, quarter-window louvers, and triple-color striping.

The Super Coupe's engine is disputed within this record's own sources. The brochure's own Optional Groups and Packages page specifies a 318 two-barrel for the Super Coupe, or a 318 four-barrel in California, while Consumer Guide separately states the Super Coupe carried only the 360, at 175 hp; this record shows both, treating the brochure as authoritative for what was advertised at printing and the secondary account as possibly describing cars as actually built or a later running change. Across the wider Road Runner-eligible lineup, Consumer Guide gives the 318 two-barrel 155 hp as the minimum Road Runner-package engine, with the 360 two-barrel optional (TorqueFlite only) and a 360 four-barrel, also TorqueFlite only and restricted to two-door models, rated 175 hp. A four-speed manual overdrive was optional only with the 318 two-barrel; TorqueFlite was required with either 360 and in California or at high altitude generally.²

The catalogue prices the Road Runner package itself at $289 and its decor group, requiring the package, at $51, while the Road Runner Sport Pak is priced in a $411-$499 range without saying which configuration takes which end, so this record carries the range rather than a single figure. Factory base prices for the plain Volaré two-door sport coupe ran $3,735 with the six and $3,905 with a V-8. One further claim was found but not tabulated: that 494 Plymouth Super Coupes were sold against 521 for the Dodge equivalent; it comes from a single secondary article, and it is not established whether Super Coupe volume was counted inside the 1,357 Road Runner total or reported separately from it.^3,4

Fourteen exterior colors were charted for 1978, from Pewter Gray Metallic and Cadet Blue Metallic through Spitfire Orange (not offered on wagons or sedans) and Formal Black, plus eight two-tone combinations for coupes built around Dark Silver Metallic or Crimson Red Sunfire Metallic primaries. The Volaré coupe measured 197.2 in overall on a 108.7-inch wheelbase, 73.3 in wide and 53.3 in tall, with a 60.0-inch front track, a 58.5-inch rear track, and a 19.5-gallon fuel tank on V-8 models; no interior trim or upholstery choice specific to the Road Runner was found in an accessible documented source.