Although buyer interest in full-size sporty cars had almost evaporated by the end of the ’60s, Chrysler continued offering its sporty 300 through 1971. A properly optioned Chrysler 300 like this 440 TNT hardtop was at least as fast as its storied ancestors, but it no longer drew much notice, and its sales were disappointing.
Commercial or technological progress is a funny thing sometimes. Newer models may be better than the older ones in every quantifiable respect and yet be perceived as diminished and inferior. It can be very difficult to compete with rose-colored recollections of storied older products, even where those legends would wither in the harsher light of newer expectations.
So it was with the Chrysler 300. The 1955 Chrysler C-300 and its “Letter Series” successors were, for a while, very formidable full-size performance cars. The C-300 and 1956 300-B were essentially well-trimmed road racers, with extra-stiff suspensions and rorty solid-lifter cams. Their racing counterparts, which really weren’t all that different from the cars you could buy, racked up an impressive competition record. Chrysler never sold a lot of them, but they added considerable luster to the “Forward Look” line.
Starting in 1962, Chrysler added a “non-letter” 300 series, originally called the 300 Sport, which rode the coattails of its more powerful brethren, but was cheaper, softer, and milder than the 300 Letter Series cars. The Letter Series continued through 1965, but the concept was becoming less and less viable in an increasingly diversified marketplace brimming with hot intermediates. The 300 had been getting softer since the 1957 300-C, and many Chrysler fans felt the final editions no longer really earned their letters; opinions differ as to which was the last “real” Letter Series edition.
The non-letter 300 stuck around until the 1971 model year. It sold okay at first, but within a few years, it suffered the same middle-child syndrome that afflicted a lot of middle-tier models of mid-priced brands, compounded by diminishing interest in sporty big cars. Its sporty vibe had become rather muted in any case: You could still get buckets and a center console, and the 300 came with a bigger standard engine, but other than concealed headlights and bucket seats, there wasn’t much you couldn’t order on a Newport or Newport Custom.
Nonetheless, if you wanted a full-size performance car, Chrysler was still prepared to sell you one. In 1970, the crucial option was the 440 TNT engine, which cost a modest $79 more than the regular 440 cid V-8 that was standard on the 300. The TNT engine had a warmer cam — although it still had hydraulic lifters, and it wasn’t as racy as the “full-race” camshafts specified on the older Letter Cars — plus an oil pan windage tray and dual exhausts. With a 9.7 to 1 compression ratio, it required premium fuel.
Chrysler rated the 440 TNT at 375 gross horsepower in 1970, a modest 25 hp bump over the standard 440. However, thanks to its low-restriction exhaust system, TNT engine’s advantage in as-installed net power was likely greater than that. I haven’t found any factory net ratings for the 1970 engine, but the 1971 version (which had slightly lower compression and rated 370 gross hp) boasted 305 net hp, a whopping 85 hp more than the standard 1971 440 (which was rated at 335 gross hp).
TorqueFlite was standard on the 300, but the 440 TNT engine came with a heavy-duty transmission with an extra front planetary pinion gear and an additional front clutch plate. Axle ratio was 3.23 with the hotter engine. A floor shifter was specified with the console, which was optional with bucket seats.
Equipped like this one, a 300 hardtop coupe had a curb weight of more than 4,500 lb, but it had enough muscle to make it a surprisingly fast car. Car Life tested a 1970 300 Hurst (a special edition version of this car, with similar weight and the same powertrain and suspension), and found it “closer to the Supercar class than you’d expect”: 0 to 60 mph in 7.1 seconds, 0 to 100 mph in 17.8 seconds, and the standing quarter mile in 15.3 sec. quarter at 94.43 mph. That was at least as fast as the street versions of the older Letter Series cars — in fact, this car was significantly quicker than the much more hardcore 1955–1956 C-300 and 300-B at speeds under 100 mph.
The 440 TNT engine came with a heavy-duty suspension package, with a bigger front anti-roll bar, thicker front torsion bars, and an extra leaf in the rear suspension. It was not very stiff in an absolute sense; its rear springs were only very slightly stiffer than the standard rear springs in a 1962 Chrysler Newport, and the heavy-duty front springs were actually softer. However, Car Life found that these cars handled surprisingly well despite their soft ride and numb steering. (Power steering was still optional on the 300, although only 0.1 percent of cars were built without it for 1970.)
In handling, this car would have been handicapped slightly compared to the 300-H Car Life drove because it was ordered with H78-15 whitewalls rather than the lower-profile H70-15 tires on the Hurst car. However, the original buyer of the gold 300 wisely specified power front disc brakes, which were optional. Most 300s had power brakes in 1970, but front discs were only installed on about half of production. Chrysler still hadn’t fully sorted the proportioning issues that had made their early disc/drum brakes so prone to abrupt rear lockup, but the discs had better fade resistance than drums in these heavy cars.
The base price of a 300 two-door hardtop in 1970 was $4,234, a sizable $645 more than a basic Newport hardtop, so it included somewhat better trim. Surprisingly, only 46 percent of 300 buyers specified power windows in 1970, although this is otherwise a heavily optioned car. Its original list price was $6,980, a relative worth of almost $65,000 in 2025 dollars.
Obviously, white vinyl upholstery isn’t the easiest to keep clean, but this car’s Mystic Gold paint could also be combined black or dark green upholstery, so I’m not sure I understand the logic of ordering white vinyl and then covering the seats with ugly, uncomfortable plastic seat covers. I suppose it made sense to someone.
Except for its fancy Tilt-A-Scope “rim-blow” wheel, the dashboard was standard early ’70s Chrysler.
The higher price and sporty mission of the 300 didn’t provide any more instrumentation than the gas gauge and ammeter, and with the 440 TNT engine, this car would likely be able to peg its 120 mph speedometer. However, there’s a no-nonsense quality to the presentation that has a certain appeal — this seems like a dashboard designed by an engineer rather than a stylist.
This car was built concurrently with the 1970 Cordoba spring special, which had a special vinyl top with an Aztec relief. The original owner of this car specified the “tortoise grain” vinyl top, which has a kind of reptile skin pattern.
Some people still have strong opinions about these “Fuselage” Chrysler big cars, but unless you hate the color or the tortoise grain roof, there’s nothing particularly offensive about the styling of this car. Its proportions aren’t the most graceful and its detailing is on the bland side, but the worst I can say is that as a whole, it seems kind of anodyne. Given some of Chrysler’s more eccentric styling efforts of the ’60s, that’s not too bad.
However, it didn’t seem to inspire much buyer excitement. Chrysler built 20,512 300s this year, 9,589 of those the two-door hardtop — much better than any of the Letter Cars, but a small chunk of Chrysler brand sales. (I don’t have any data on how many cars had the 440 TNT engine, but I suspect not too many.) After 1971, Chrysler decided they could get along just fine without the 300.
People who’d loved the Letter Series cars still mostly turned up their noses at these “plain” 300s. That some of them were faster than the vaunted ’50s Hemi cars and actually handled and stopped better was beside the point. The early Letter cars had been surprisingly brutish for big domestic models, especially ones with semi-premium badges, and everything that came later was inevitably perceived as dumbed-down and compromised.
For people who didn’t remember the old Letter Cars, the 300 was just a throwback to the now-dated buckets-and-console fad of the early ’60s. Most automakers had given up offering buckets on full-size cars by this time: You could still get them on a Ford XL or Mercury Marauder X-100, and Plymouth offered them through 1973, but it appears the only full-size GM cars of 1970 that still offered buckets were the Buick Wildcat Custom and Oldsmobile Delta 88 Royale. People who wanted sporty cars mostly bought pony cars, hot intermediates, or maybe a Duster 340.
To make matters worse, if you DID want a full-size car that could run with some (but not all) midsize muscle cars, the 300 was sharing the showroom with the similar Plymouth Sport Fury GT, which was somewhat cheaper and came with the even hotter 440 6-barrel engine. The GT wasn’t a big seller either, but between that and the memories of the older Letter Series, Chrysler was competing with itself, and losing.
Related Reading
Vintage Review: 1970 Chrysler 300H – Road Test Magazine Reviews A Very Rare Chrysler (by GN)
1970 Chrysler Newport Cordoba: The Rare Fuselage Cordoba C-Body (by Aaron Severson)
Curbside Classic: 1970 Chrysler 300 Hurst – A Spicy Cocktail Created By George And Walter, With Help From Linda (by Jason Shafer)
Vintage Road Test: 1970 Plymouth Sport Fury GT 440 Six Pack – A Rare Road Test For A Rare Car (by Aaron Severson)
1971 Chrysler Newport Royal: Chrysler’s Deadly Sin #6, The Underachieving Fuselage Years (by J P Cavanaugh)
Knowing full well the “less than optimal” space efficiency of the fuselage cars, I like them. Especially if they lack the added rub and chrome strips and even more so if they are missing the vinyl roof. Alrhough when it’s an odd one (Aztec, tortoise, flowers) I could be won over. Loop bumpers front and rear are pluses too, I mean, check out that rear… that is imposing. The one thing that always stuck out for me Is the front grill insert . For lack of a better description I think it looks a little buck toothed. Pulling the grills front edge out in the middle doesn’t do anything harmonious.. it just looks like a designer thought he had to make something more “interesting “and failed , same with the twin trim pieces. Just seems like ornamentation without purpose
Good call on the grille being pulled out in the middle. I’d never noticed it before but maybe they didn’t want the 300 to look too much like a Charger, which had the grille insert flat across the entire length of the loop bumper. I definitely prefer the 1969 300 grille first, with the 1971 grille the worst of the fuselage 300 grilles.
Of course, maybe the stylists were simply trying to maintain a family resemblence with the rest of the fuselage Chryslers, all which had the same styling feature of a pulled-out center section.
Never noticed before how the belt line scale that started on the top of the front fender continued up onto the leading g edge of the C pillar, a nice touch. Love Fuseys but still think the Chrysler 2 dr coupes look microcephalic, out of proportion, the roof too low and trunk too long. 4 dr hardtops and even sedans were much better balanced.
Microcephalic – exactly the word I was looking for.
Full-size muscle competitors to the fuselage Chrysler 300 TNT Plymouth Sport Fury GT were the Mercury Marauder X-100 and Buick Wildcat/Centurion.
The Wildcat was replaced in 1971 by the new Centurion but low sales meant the others were gone after 1971, while the Buick only made it for another two years and would also be cancelled after the 1973 model year.
Even then, the last 1973 Centurion’s base engine was down from the still optional 455 to a 350.
Yes, the 1970 Wildcat Custom was still offered with buckets as a no-cost option — I’d missed that, so I added it to the text, along with the X-100. Bucket seats were not common on either; according to the data submitted to Automotive News for the 1970 model year, they went into only 1,514 Wildcats and 1,729 Marauders. I also missed that buckets were still optional on the Oldsmobile Delta 88 Royale hardtop in 1970. Oldsmobile really didn’t pitch the Royale as any kind of sporty car, so it’s interesting that it was more frequently ordered with buckets than the Buick and the Mercury put together: Olds said 3,264 cars got Strato-Buckets, almost 25 percent of Royale production.
The vehicle division that’s left out of a full-size, upscale performance car discussion is Pontiac. I’m guessing their entrant would be a loaded Bonneville, sales of which would likely eclipse that of all the other vehicles here, combined.
The side views of the car highlight a big problem with the fuselage C-body two-door hardtops – the greenhouse looks too small compared to the main body. The mismatch got worse as you climbed the Chrysler Corporation brand ladder. These look much better as four-door hardtops or convertibles, in my opinion.
I always thought these fuselage 2-door sport hardtops looked really badly proportioned, like they were forced to use the roof stamping and side glass meant for a smaller car. With a dark vinyl top like this I could unkindly compare it to a skateboard with a bubble in the griptape. I always thought that unlike most cars of its’ era it was designed as a 4-door first and the 2-door was an afterthought.
Conversely, fuseys look great in station-wagon form, and if you’re buying something this big why not make it as useful as possible? The only thing a Town and Country with woodgrain delete in this gold with the saddle-tan interior that was available on them if not the 300 has standing in its’ way is, once again, the Fury Custom Suburban next to it on the lot that was 99% of the car for 80% of the price of a T&C.
Never noticed how that belt line scallop continued up onto the C-pillar… nice touch. Still looks micro-cephalic to me though.
That’s probably the ugliest instrument panel I’ve ever seen. You couldn’t pay me to sit in front of that thing, and I am an engineer.
Ten years earlier Chrysler instrument panels were amazing! I just saved some images of one the other day to show my wife.
Shared across their lines for several years all looking the same black plastic. If you have ever had a Fusie car and touched the dash up close it is really cheap looking and feeling. A far cry of the dashes from 1966 and prior.
As many have mentioned the 2 door car looks like Zippy the pin head.
An above poster touched on my issue and that is of space efficiency. This car is terrible and it is easy to see how small the passenger compartment was compared to the rest of the car. An intermediate didn’t give up much (if any) passenger room to a full sized car, so it is not surprise that in this era, said full sized cars were on their way out.
The hot 440 is really cool but I’d wager fuel consumption was in single digits.
Quite a handsome, carriage. Sad the interior is white. Bet it rides, nice.
I like these but these colors and wheel covers on this one just say generic 70s full sizer. Throw on a high impact color, skip the vinyl top and go with the optional 15” aluminum wheels and that would be my ideal 300.
I love these, but a 1970 Plymouth Sport Fury is what I would have chosen back then or now.
I always thought the front loop bumpers on these looked too heavy somehow, although the sheer size of the car with the smallish roof is impressive in its own unique way, and the rear end is perfect.
The wheel covers on this one are just depressing, not attractive in any way, very cheap looking.
Well, you got the 440 TNT (“Super Commando” in Plymouth-speak) engine in the Sport Fury GT as standard equipment.
But, stangely, it was only rated at the same 350 hp of the 300’s standard single-exhaust 440, versus the 375 hp of the optional TNT.
If the dealer decal is original, this is a Canadian car purchased at Kingston (Ontario) Chrysler. Still in business at the same location. I’d ride my bike there on Sundays in the fall in the mid ’70s to look at the new models.
In 1972, my dear MIL wandered into the Boise dealer looking for a Plymouth and drove out in a Chrysler 2-dr 300- something. On our trips to visit, I was tasked with dealing with the service department with all the issues.
See that big door? The hinges were woefully inadequate and closing involved hoisting it enough to clear the sill. The disc/drums grabbed so unevenly that a firm stop often evolved into a visit into the adjoining traffic lane. And so on. Mopar quality control as well as dealer service was pitiful and most car magazines were quick to point it out.
After a frustrating year and a half, she traded for a new Buick
Is that body on frame or unibody.
Unibody!
Despite their shortcomings and controversial styling, I was a fan of these things but freely admit I liked the previous generation better. I liked the ’69 Sport Fury convertible the best as it neatly sidesteps some of the styling issues like the proportionally small greenhouse (at least with the top down) and overdone ‘loop’ bumpers.
When new we younger folks derided cars like this as “old man’s cars” because only those who’d made it could afford them .
The joke was on us as I now know these were wonderful drivers, styling is always very subjective, I didn’t like the Fuselage cars at all when new, now in my 70’s I think they look fine if still TOO BIG for me =8-) .
That this is a survivor pleases me to no end .
I see that weird “rim blow” steering wheel is kaput .
-Nate
That dashboard layout with the switches and everything was the exact same as my grandfather’s 1970 Chrysler Newport sedan which was some sort of puke pea green (no vinyl top) with a dark green cloth interior. He died after having it only six months and my father, his son, got it. It was the first car I learned to drive. It had the 290hp/380lb-ft 6.3L 383, and needed every bit of that low end torque to get that tank moving. What a vessel I wish I had today!