1975 Plymouth Road Runner

Plymouth threw down the gauntlet when it created the original Road Runner. Its low price and superior performance made it the bane of many competing drag racers. The Road Runner’s glory days were short-lived, however, as forces were gathering to quell factory performance. Yet, while most of its rivals were dead and gone by the mid-’70s, the Road Runner lived on.

Plymouth’s decision to produce a Satellite coupe that had a completely unique body — sharing no sheetmetal with the four-door — was unusual in the industry in 1971. After the ’74 model year, Plymouth and Dodge dropped their respective coupes and introduced new ones for 1975 that shared styling with the existing sedans. At the same time, the Satellite name was replaced with the Fury badge.

Through all of this, the Road Runner persevered, landing on the new B-body coupe for what would turn out to be a one-year-only, Fury-based Road Runner. Period literature exclaimed that despite the then modern-day consumer’s appetite for personal luxury, the Road Runner “…makes you forget that mistaken notion that cars can’t be fun anymore.” An attempt to back up this claim