Right off the bat I feel like I need to mention that the intent of Glorious Garbage is not to exclusively feature Mopar cars, and yet it would be nearly impossible for me to prove that were you to look at the ones we’ve done so far. I get that. And, I do have other Glorious Garbage candidates here, but I got started on this one before it hit me it’s yet another Chrysler product, and, well, here we are. So, just trust that I will mix up our Glorious Garbage offerings, but for the moment we may as well revel in the glorious garbagosity of this car, the 1975 Plymouth Road Runner.
To understand why specifically the 1975 Plymouth Road Runner qualifies for Glorious Garbage status, we should refresh everybody on what the Road Runner once was. You see, even way back in 1968, automotive bloat was a thing, and it was noted that the original crop of muscle cars was getting more bloated and expensive. Plymouth understood the growing hole in the market, and filled it with a reasonably-priced, basic (as in vinyl bench seats, carpet optional, not too many options) muscle car, all about cheap fun.
Based on the Plymouth Belvedere, these cars had a special version of Chrysler’s 383 cubic inch V8, with heads that featured bigger intake and exhaust valves, which came from the higher-end GTX, along with stiffer valve springs, intake manifold and cam also snagged from the fancier sibling. In the Road Runner, the engine made 335 hp and 425 foot-pounds of torque, making the (relatively) lightweight car a genuine beast.
The Road Runner got even better in ’71, when it got the “fuselage” styling that Chrysler was doing across their lineup, making for a very imposing-looking and dramatic car:
Cheap, fast and fun is a pretty damn good formula for a muscle car, and if you want to crank up the whimsy by not just licensing a famously fast cartoon bird as a mascot, but engineering a horn to mimic its distinctive meep meep call, then even better. Plymouth was giving you a real-world cartoon car, and they were more than happy to remind you of that in their commercials:
That’s fun, right? Of course it is! And the Road Runner continued to be fun for quite a while, but inevitable bloating and emission regulation power-sucking took their toll, withe the car moving away from its cheap muscle car roots by 1973, and then, in 1975, the Road Runner was now based on the new B-Body Fury design, which was bigger and softer and more comfort/luxury focuses, and not really what you’d pick for a muscle car.
You can see the whole Fury line that Road Runner was now a part of here in this dealer training video; I have it cued up to the part where they show the Road Runner, but you can scrub back and see all of the ’70s bloaty, wallowy, velour-slathered goodness:
They also say “single headlights give a finished, quality look,” which is a hilarious thing to say, considering literally every car that didn’t want to spring for quad headlamps had the exact same setup. I guess they give more of a “finished, quality look” than just having empty holes where the headlights should be, sure. Seriously, those are the exact same lights as a Beetle or Gremlin or Pinto or Civic whatever. Man, they were reaching.
So, this was now the car being handed to the Road Runner team, who were told to, you know, make this feel like a muscle car. Take this soft, heavy, wallowy “personal luxury coupé” and somehow turn it into something it very much isn’t.
And, it really very much wasn’t. Out of 7,183 1975 Road Runners sold, well over half had the base engine, a sad 318 cubic inch V8 that wheezed out only 145 horsepower, and those horses were glumly shoved through a three-speed Torqueflite automatic or a three-speed manual. Sure, there were other engine options, a few 400 cubic inch V8s that could make 160 hp or 185 hp or even up to a decent 235 hp, but not too many of those really hot ones were birthed by the factory.
I admire what the designers were able to do with this thing to try and capture some of the essence of Road Runnerhood, especially because all they really had to work with were some decals and wheels. The hockey stick-shaped stripe that goes from the front corner and swoops up the B-pillar, then over the roof, is good, but what I really like the the referential creativity taken with what would have ordinarily been the biggest styling hinderance to making this thing feel sporty: that squared-off, sorta-Continental-style rear trunk lid design.
I guess that raised hive back there is supposed to suggest a spare tire hump? Even though the top is flattened? Whatever it was, it just doesn’t scream “muscle car,” so the decal people got really creative and did this:
See that? They’ve transformed that hump into something that suggests a painted-on-a-solid-wall tunnel, like the classic Road Runner cartoon gag:
There’s not a lot of wildlife other than the Southwestern Desperate Coyote that attempts to catch prey via trompe l’oeil, but Wile. E. Coyote is one of them. Of course, it never works, but that failure is perhaps the most iconic of the Road Runner recurring gags, so it makes sense to reference it on the trunk of the car.
As far as I know, it’s the only example of a tunnel being used as a decorative element on a car?
The Road Runner team was really, really trying here. In addition to the stripes, tunnel graphic, a little Road Runner badge for the grille that resembled a tarot card, and a few other Road Runner graphics, there wasn’t all that much to distinguish the car.
On the inside you could get those fun, Taco Bell-food-ingredients-colored Sundance seats, artfully arrayed on someone’s lawn in that picture, and you could get an optional “Tuff” steering wheel, complete with a nice round rubber pad to smack your forehead into when those brakes invariably locked up on you. You could also add a tach, If you didn’t mind sacrificing an oversize fuel gauge and two idiot lights.
Really, the 1975 Road Runner wasn’t that great a car to drive. It wasn’t that quick, didn’t handle well, and was overall a far cry from the back-to-basics Road Runner that started it all. But, it still had some appeal, not the least of which was the iconic Road Runner horn that was specially designed, using such tricks as aluminum instead of copper windings inside, no trumpet, and a mounting that allowed for more resonance so it could better emulate the trademark beep-beep (I always heard it as meep-meep) of the Road Runner. It was even badged as “Voice of Road Runner”:
Here, have a listen:
There’s no question that from a muscle car perspective, the ’75 Road Runner is garbage. But, it achieves Glorious Garbage status because, dammit, they really tried, at least within their decidedly non-trivial limits. The graphics were clever, it had The Horn, and it just didn’t take itself too seriously. Having a nice one of these now would be kind of fun, and compared to the rest of Plymouth Road Runner culture, having a 1975 one would mean you had nothing to prove. You’re not going to have the fastest car, so who gives a shit? You’re there to have fun.
This car is a big tray of ball park nachos. The cheese is clearly the maximum level of FDA-approved plastic a human can ingest, the colors are all eye-searingly vivid, the peppers and whatever were probably grown in a lab, but, who cares? You’re gonna enjoy the crap out of it. I have a suspicion that’s generally how 1975 Road Runner owners feel, and I respect that.
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Oh and the Ford Mustang. A pony car due to pony power but beautiful and a great seller. But early 70s Ford says screw the mustang put that badge on the exploding Pinto. Yes glorious to dangerous garbage. You need to reach out to older peopke.
Okay JT how about the Ford truck f150 laredo edition? At one point fords elite model of a few years of great sales attached its name to a basic manual tranny, vinyl flooring no AC and sold as a Laredo. It was Lacrappo. Talk about Glorious to Garbage. They didnt even lower the price people were upside down for years and those models were poor in production to.
So as a car salesman of the late 80s cover that.
You cant talk any Mopar from these years and not mention the abysmal quality control. I spent 7 months at a Chrysler/Plymouth dealer before I defected to a import store and never looked back. Stalactites of paint drips hanging off the rocker panels which we cut off with a razor blade during PDI, a Volare that had the trim and grille from a Dodge Aspen, a new Dodge pickup with the brake lines on top of the rear axel pinched underneath the clamps for the leaf springs (it was fun watching that one get backed down the ramp off the top tier of the carrier) etc. etc. I was young and wet behind the ears but I was sure that Chrysler Corp. was not long for this world and got the hell out.
You cant talk any Mopar from ANY years and not mention the abysmal quality control.
Maybe it’s all the reruns of old movies and TV shows like The Rockford Files and The Blues Brothers I watched growing up, but I still find Malaise Era cars rather charming in their own way.
I think it would be kinda cool to turbocharge one of these poor low-comp 318ci Road Runners without a blow-off valve. Imagine a turbo flutter coming from the most unlikely source on the street, followed by ‘meep-meep!’
Great example of an absolutely awful design effectively killing a successful model.
You should do another one like this about the crime against humanity that is the 3rd generation Dodge Dakota. 2nd gen Dakota was a SMASH HIT, selling like crazy, and still very attractive trucks if you can find one without rust holes, tacoma sized, V8 power, just awesome! Then the 3rd gen came out and sucked so bad it killed the Dakota off completely
Glad to see someone out there appreciates the second generation as much as I did and hated the third generation as much as I did. Seriously, what the fuck was that? Who takes maybe the most handsome truck on the road and completely ruins it with some dumb fuck blocky awkward styling?
I don’t know but it was so god damn bad it ruined what was once the most popular midsize truck out there. Huge shame.
To be fair, it was pretty much the only midsize pickups for fifteen years or so.
I always felt that Mitsubishi did the third gen Dakota better than Dodge did.
I can’t believe you didn’t mention the most glorious incarnation of the RoadRunner family: The 1970 SuperBird! My neighbor Jeff Fetzko’s dad bought one new in bright yellow “Lemon Twist” and that was the most amazing car I’ve ever ridden in. I hope he held onto it as they routinely go for 6 figures these days.
Gee thanks Jay Tee, now I’m going down the rabbit hole of how to wire up a horn, so it says “meep-meep” instead of just “meeeeep”, when you press the horn button 😉
Poor little Roadrunner never hurt anyone, just runnin’ down the road’s his idea of having fun.
Is Jason’s use of commas the norm or is it “Just Jason”?
The norm. It could be argued that there might be a couple of unneeded commas, but as an old newspaper editor (remember schlepping out the door to get the real paper newspaper?), I’d let it go as written.
“sad 318 cubic inch V8 that wheezed out only 145 horsepower”
318 cubic inches converts to 5.2 litres.
Which means this engine produced 27.8 horsepower per litre.
Yes I know “emissions gear saps power” and I know that American V8s are about low revs and torque as much as they are about power, but jeez as a European that’s pathetic.
To put that into context a 1.6 litre engine with the same 27.8 horsepower per litre would have 44.5 horsepower. The 1st Gen VW Golf GTi that came out just a year later in 1976 had a 1.6 engine giving 108 horsepower, that’s 2.4 times as much.
It’s a wonder that the US car industry survived that era.
45 hp for 1.6 litre is about the same as the regular german VW bus from around that time, so not that uncommon. They also needed low down torque for dragging around heavy stuff (the load), just like big american cars (themselves..)
Two things:
One, the 318 probably made three times as much torque as that VW engine, and at very low revs. It’s a different style of engine, built to do a different job. It’s basically a truck engine. So it’s a bit of an apples and oranges comparison to simply look at horsepower (which can be measured in different ways anyway) vs displacement.
Two, the same VW engine in the US-spec Rabbit at the time was rated at 75 hp, not 108.
Not saying the lean-burn 318 in this car was brilliant, but for the time, it wasn’t terrible.
They survived by getting huge loans from the government and favorable government policy to try and stifle foreign competition. This is what the wealthy refer to as “the free market”.
Also, the Japanese automakers got together to implement a “voluntary import restraint agreement” – basically preventing the US government from taking further protectionist action against them by capping their own imports at lower levels than the market demanded. Was a major boon for their dealers, who could now add heavy market adjustment markups to Toyotas and Hondas, and did also give the domestics a few years of stability. Until the Japanese got their new US plants fully up and running and could then shift their imports to higher margin luxury models
I have to take issue with the idea that the 1968 HP 383 somehow had special heads. The head castings and valve sizes were axactly the same as all other B and RB heads produced in 1968. The only difference in the heads were the valve springs. The regular heads had single valve springs. The HP heads had dual valve springs. The other differences were a hotter grind cam, straight out of the 440 HP parts bin, 440 HP exhaust manifolds, a high rise dual plane intake manifold similar to the 440 HP design, the 440 HP carburetor and the unsilenced aircleaner. I grew up in that Era and I was a Mopar freak. It really bothers me when authors write about this stuff that do not know what they are writing about. If you don’t know, do some research, don’t just make stuff up.
Damn I love the ’71, it just looks so rude.
I unapologetically love low production attempts at “sporty” versions of malaise era American cars, even if they’re usually lipstick on a pig. If I had Jay Leno money I’d have a hangar full of things like this, a Citation X-11, Pontiac Can Am, Lancer Shelby, etc. I’ve already owned two examples – a Dodge Omni GLH and a Ford LTD LX.
I am so glad I am not the only one. Don’t even talk about the Chevy Monza Mirage or we will be best friends forever.
I want to know more about the “polycast urethane road wheels.” Are they seriously plastic wheels? In 1975?
Basically, its a plastic hubcap styled to look like a cast aluminum wheel, which is then permanently bonded to the steel rim, a plastic veneer, essentially, like laminating a thin strip of figured maple to the top of plywood.
Thank you! I had never heard of this term or method before!
They were reasonably popular into the 1980s, some hung on into the ’90s, and honestly really do look an awful lot like cast aluminum. Somewhat different sheen to them, and they don’t age quite the same
As a Gen-X’r who has always been into cars, I see that I have more research to do! Thank you again.
Whoa! Pontiac honeycomb wheels?!?!
I think the current Sienna has similarly created wheels. Though I think they have an alloy base vs steel.
Citroën invented some plastic/resin/something wheels for rallying the SM around 1970 (great story, look it up), so theoretically it is possible! But here I guess it’s just marketing for hubcaps 😎
Artfully arrayed on someone’s lawn? I’m pretty sure that’s just all that was left after being parked through a Midwest winter.
Also, all the Malaise Mopar pseudo-muscle cars seem like they would’ve been well represented outside Comisky Park for Disco Demolition Night.
I am an admitted Mopar fan, and I have absolutely no issue with the assessment of the ’75 RR as “garbage”.
Frankly, by 1975 most things – cars, clothes, food, houses – were pretty fugly.
I test-drove a ’73 Charger in the mid-1990s, and it still had the plaid trunk liner and the original bias-ply spare tire. That plaid was much better than the featured Road Runner interior. 🙂
I was going to say, I mostly remember Mopars of this vintage as they were by the early ’90s – with the wheel arches vastly enlarged by rust, ratty retreaded snow tires on the rear in all seasons, at least one bumper held up by rope, and vinyl roof flapping in the breeze. You could hear the creaking and groaning noises from the suspension long before the car itself rattled into view. Their natural habitat was the unpaved gravel parking lots of flea markets and the pockmarked asphalt in front of seedy bowling alleys that hadn’t been renovated or cleaned since the ’50s.
This might be a myth, but I heard that after they spent time and money making the beep-beep horn it was pointed out that it sounded just like a military Jeep. Putting that cave decal on a Cordoba is hilarious! I thought that ’71 fuselage body was gorgeous.
Spot on. It does sound like an old military Jeep.
Thanks. That’s significantly cheaper, even with a two beep horn module than spending $90 on EBay for the a Roadrunner horn that I didn’t know I absolutely needed until today.
“The Road Runner got even better in ’71, when it got the “fuselage” styling that Chrysler was doing across their lineup, making for a very imposing-looking and dramatic car”
Maybe it’s just me, but I disagree. I never understood the appeal of the ’71 and later. Same thing with Mustangs after ’70. About the only car I thought looked better in ’71 was the Barracuda (and I once owned a ’68 coupe, which I think was underrated). Everything else just got uglier after ’70.
Torino was far better looking from ’70-72 than ’68-69
I totally agree – suddenly everything got FAT.
I agree about 71 Plymouth and Dodge styling. Hated it. Plus, I had a ’71 Belvedere 4-door as a company car. That car’s brakes were absolutely dangerous! I hope it didn’t extend to all of them, but I was terrified of the one I drove.
I personally feel 71 was the high water mark for Mopar B and E-body styling, that’s why I own one. 72 was still good but the 73 refresh, while still okay was hampered by the 5 mph bumper rule along with the trend to do sticker packages to cover for the steep decline in performance brought on by emissions requirements and insurance companies. As for 75+, well if big “personal luxury coupes” are your thing they can be had relatively cheap and provide a halfway decent starting point for a performance project. I had a 79 Magnum that was legitimately fun, if not exactly a hot rod.
I agree with your assessment 100%. The fuselage styling was just plain bloated. The leaner, purer late-60’s styling was just better overall.
The Taco Bell Interior is so bad it’s good, but the rest of it is a hard no. I’d rather have the cushy Fury version as it’s not pretending to be something it isn’t.
Speaking of going from four headlights down to two, the two-eyed Gran Fury Brougham and 1974-1978 Matadors were two of the weirdest things to happen during the entire decade.
Oh man, I had to look at images of them both to refresh my memory, horrible design, as strange as I now remember. Honestly, was any american car a decent design in the 70s?
Sorry about making fun of your opinion on manuals the other day. I meant what I said but I sometimes don’t recognize the loss of inflection in writing. It was meant to sound like a joke between friends, not an attack on you.
You gotta hand it to Wile E. Coyote. He really was a talented painter, and fast, too.
Fast forward another year to 1976, and the Road Runner is a frikkin’ VOLARE! Pathetic.
someone should swap a Coyote in a Road Runner 😛
I had no idea that horn existed and now I must find one. Great for courtesy honks. Who could get mad at that?
Cars need courtesy horns. Then make the real horn louder. Insurance rates would drop.
French cars used to have separate city and country horns for that
My Peterbilt has this setup. A tiny horn button on the wheel that lets other drivers know the light is green and a pull down chord that lets them know it’s time to change your underwear.
The first generation Volt has one! It’s a little button on the left stalk that warbles out a polite “pardon me” flutter.
In 1968 there was one optional engine offered, the 426 Hemi.
I think some mention is always due the late Brock Yates, when discussing the origins of the Road Runner.
It may be an age thing, but the first version was in my opinion the best version in it’s most raw and cheap form.
My favorite thing about malaise-era cars, particularly Mopars, is that, while yes, they were slow, inefficient, and ill-handling stock, it really didn’t take much to wake ‘em up. Yeah, that 318 maybe made 145hp from the factory, but those engines had (and have) an astronomical aftermarket for speed parts. It’s really not difficult to double or even triple the engine output for (even in modern dollars) not much more than a grand. Suspension-wise, there were good options then for handling upgrades, and now whole pro-touring drop-in suspensions are available. In some ways, Malaise Mopars make better bases for hot rodding because they’ll never reach the collectibility status of, say, a big-block ‘69 Charger.
Now you’ve got me thinking about a sleeper Cordoba or Mirada….