(first posted 8/18/2011) I suspect it takes a special sort of person to drive a ratty Dodge Challenger. I’d imagine the owner is a gruff, no nonsense sort of guy. You know the sort of fellow who has no time for petty concerns like detailing, paint, or even washing his favorite ride. The passenger side mirror askew? Screw it! I’m the driver and don’t need any stinking passenger side mirror. In fact, I have no need for the word askew, unless it’s the rear end of the Challenger peeling out in a cloud of smoke. And yes, Vanishing Point was the most formative cultural event of my youth.
Sadly, I never got to meet the owner of this gnarly Challenger. The plates indicate he is from Saskatchewan, which is known in automotive circles for its cheap auto insurance and lack of safety inspections. From the non-car perspective, Saskatchewan is most known for being endlessly flat and boring. The sort of place best gotten through as fast as possible. Which might explain the Challenger’s original mission.
If you are in Alberta you probably have heard a few jokes like “last one to leave Saskatchewan should turn out the lights” and such. But that isn’t being fair to the place, as only a small portion is flat and boring. For the car buff, Saskatchewan is full of old cars both on the road and in rural vintage-filled junkyards.
Sadly, I don’t think I have any photos of any of it as the one time recently I drove through Saskatchewan I was driving a recently acquired four hundred dollar Mazda B2000. Just to up the ante there was a white-out snow storm and temperatures of -40C (the conversion is an easy one as that is also -40F). It and I did manage to make it home in one piece, thankfully, but there were more than a few white knuckle moments.
Our example here sports the butt in the air, raised rear suspension and a set of slot mag wheel as was the fashion in the seventies. The slot wheels are a timeless design that looks good on anything from a ’32 Ford hot rod to a Datsun 510, but the jacked up rear end on a muscle car has thankfully (mostly) faded for the scene. The dual exhaust pipes promise a V8 under the hood, but it could be anything from a mild 318 to a big 440. I think we can pretty safely rule out this being a Hemi car.
The aftermarket tach, shifter, hood pins and odd mail-box inspired hood scoop duct would lead me to believe the owner drives it like it was meant to be driven. The lack of bumper guards indicates it is a pre-1973 example. If I am correct on my grill id, this is a 1970 which makes it one of the most desirable years.
Definitely more than a few rough patches on this one with cracking paint, rust, pitted chrome, etc. With the exception of a few exposed wires the interior looks remarkably well preserved. No tears or stains on the white vinyl seats and all door panels accounted for. The steering wheel amazingly looks blemish free and perhaps even more impressive is the dash with only has a few cracks in it. I wouldn’t doubt that an old stock dash stored in a climate controlled warehouse could have a few cracks in it. I don’t know if it was a generally cheapening of materials or some other reason but it is very rare to see any car of this era with a flawless, original dash.
For those who criticize the current Challenger for being too big, you have to understand it is only being true to its roots. The success of the upmarket Mercury Cougar prompted Dodge to make the Challenger big with more than a dash of luxury (at least by Pony car standards of the day). The Challenger‘s wheelbase is two inches longer than its stable mate the Plymouth Barracuda. Contemporary reviews weren’t exactly glowing and sales no were near the GM and Ford pony cars. Of course the Challenger’s timing wasn’t ideal either with rising insurance rates and stricter emission regulations which eventually moved the market to a personal luxury Monte Carlo style car. Interestingly the Challenger demands some of the strongest values, with the rare Hemi and 440cid variants grabbing most of the attention.
The red Daytona next to it makes an interesting contrast. After the demise of the long forgotten Sapporo sourced Challenger, the Daytona was left as Dodge’s sporty coupe in the late Eighties and early Nineties. With this scene happening in Canada, that isn’t even a Dodge Daytona but a Chrysler Daytona, with Chrysler going through an odd period of emphasizing the Dodge name on the minivan and truck line and Chrysler on the car line. But with front wheel drive and those aftermarket heart seat covers I can surmise my theoretical Challenger owner would want nothing to do with the Daytona.
I suspect the Challenger isn’t long for this world in its current condition. More than likely it will soon be restored to perfection and perhaps even in Plum Crazy purple to join rows of other perfect E-bodies at the local car show. Or as a Vanishing Point clone. But I did enjoy seeing it in this fantastic Seventies time capsule condition, and letting my imagination run a bit wild.
“I suspect the Challenger isn’t long for this world in its current condition”. I suspect this has BEEN its condition since about 1973.
In Saskatchewan in the ’60s and ’70s, it was possible to insure any car for peanuts. The government had a monopoly on car coverage, and basic coverage, including liability was included in the price of the license plate. Of course it was possible to buy extra coverage, from the same aforementioned government.
Picayune little details such as owner’s age and driving record had no bearing on the basic coverage premium. Everyone paid the same for any given year and model. There was minimal or no premium penalty for selecting the largest engine in the most overtly muscular version. In that environment, it was no wonder that muscle sold like hotcakes.
Thus, Saskatchewan became a haven for vintage iron buffs. The land of the barn find. As for the ravages of the elements, salt was little used until the 80s. So even though cars rusted, the prairie tinworm went through our iron with nowhere near the speed and voraciousness of it’s eastern Quebec and Ontario cousins.
For the record, I paid $56 to insure a 1966 Mustang in 1979. My 1972 LeMans was $82. Even near new cars struggled to top the $250 mark. Alas, even though our beloved government insurance still exists, it was subject to “free market” based “reforms” imposed upon us by a so-called “conservative” government in the 80s.
As for the car, well let’s just say that, having grown up there, I wouldn’t relish meeting it’s owner one bit.
BTW where was this taken? Something tells me Medicine Hat.
If I had to guess I’d say the car hails from Swift Current, which always was a hotbed of hotroddin’ (or ratroddin?)
This was taken in downtown Lethbridge, Alberta.
Thanks for the background on Saskatchewan’s insurance.
It is still dirt cheap, Roger. My business partner insures his 1978 Sedan DeVille for $300 a year. It would be four times that in Vancouver or more.
I watched the movie Vanishing Point in the theater at about age 12 with some older cousins. The movie made no sense to me at all, other than the cool white Challenger. I need to rent the movie and give it another try. Maybe I will get it, or maybe it was just one of those early 70s movies that nobody was supposed to understand.
A few years ago, I would occasionally see a Hemi Orange Challenger convertible driving around my area – it was a ratty looking original car, but fun to see out on the street. I have not seen it in awhile, and suspect that it was sold for too much money to someone putting too much more money into it so it can be sold for REALLY too much money. I guess people have finally figured out the secret of a Mopar – a loving and careful complete re-assembly solves virtually every problem the cars ever had.
I bet even when the car looked like that other people in the parking lot will take extra care not to ding it, just in case he notices…
Wow, what a blast from the past! That hood scoop looks like the ones the Harwood company used to make their money on, it looks a lot like the ones they sold as a “Mopar” pro stock style scoop.
The Vanishing Point movie was redone as a TV movie in 1997. It wasn’t too bad, in fact in this version it actually made some sense as opposed to the acid-trip induced earlier version. http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Vanishing_Point_%281997_film%29
I can remember when the streets of Northeast Ohio roamed with beasts like those.
Owner of a rusting, poor condition Mopar with a giant hood scoop= gruff, no-nonsense kind of guy.
Owner of a rusting, poor condition F-body with a giant hood scoop= brainless, imbred white trash.
Sometimes life just isn’t fair.
That rusty-looking Challenger sure reminds me of the time, in about 1980, that I looked at a similar car at a local car lot, priced way below what they were going for at the time. Well, I saw the Vermont plates, so I started looking for body rust – not difficult as most of it was more obvious than the plates…everywhere along the bottoms and in the wheel cutouts, and in places like the cowl panel between the hood and windshield. It had rally wheels, but there was a lot of surface rust on them too. Thought I’d drive it to evaluate the engine and transmission condition…it really was at about parts-car price…and found that the 340 engine clattered, the transmission shifted loose and sloppy, and every time I hit a little bump the whole front clip would shake around in a manner that suggested severe subframe rust. I walked away amazed that some sailor had driven it from Vermont to western Washington and that it had remained intact.
The reason the Challenger and E-body Barracuda were so big was that they were essentially cut-down B-body intermediates, rather than restyled A-body compacts (like the previous generation Barracuda or the Valiant Duster/Dodge Dart Demon). So, the Challenger was sort of a shortened Charger, not unlike the current car’s relationship to the LX sedan.
Vanishing Point and Two-Lane Blacktop would make for a good double bill…
As any aging motorhead already knows, the root cause of the E-body’s size is that Chrysler had to use the B-body’s firewall to accomodate the largest Chrysler engines. In essence, the seventies’ Challenger/Barracuda was a ponycar styled around the wide, B-body firewall. While beautiful, they were horrid in virtually every other aspect. They just weren’t very good cars.
In fact, if not for the sexy styling, the E-body would get a whole lot more blame for the demise of Chrysler (and would invariably be labeled a ‘deadly sin’). Besides costing the company large amounts of cash in development that was never recovered, E-body sales came not from competitors, but from owners of other Chrysler products. The people who bought the few E-bodies sold weren’t coming from GM or Ford products – they had been driving Chargers, Super Bees, and Roadrunners. And those few E-body buyers found out, real fast, how poorly the E-body was built in comparison to the Mopars they traded in on them. That’s why it’s every bit as amazing to, today, see any E-body daily-driver as, say, a late fifties’ Exner ‘Forward Look’ Mopar.
Still, the movie-lover in me would love to see a new ‘Kowalski-edition’ white Challenger to match the ‘Bullitt’ edition Mustangs. The biggest issue would be that Kowalki’s 1970 Challenger was quite a bit more nondescript than Bullitt’s ’68 Mustang, essentially meaning that any plain white Challenger is a ‘Kowalski edition’.
Your points are well taken. First-year E-body sales weren’t that bad – production almost hit 140,000. But the following year production collapsed to under 50,000. The portly 1971 Mercury Cougar outsold the Challenger and Barracuda combined. Challenger production barely inched past the AMC Javelin. Barracuda sales were so bad that the Duster 340 model gave it a run for its money.
Meanwhile, the A-body compacts were selling like hotcakes even though they were getting rather old in the tooth. In 1971 roughly 186,000 Dusters were produced.
Ironically, Chrysler might have gotten more bang for its buck if it had kept its pony cars on the A-body. With the onset of a recession in the early 1970s, the market swung back to lower-priced and smaller coupes. The original Mustang would have done much better than the milk cow Ford thought people wanted. Same with Chrysler, but add quality lapses.
The Cougar was helped by the fact that Mercury pitched it as more of a personal luxury car than a ponycar. Given its more formal styling, this wasn’t a stretch. It still was somewhat compromised in its execution. Motor Trend tested a 1971 or 1972 Cougar against a Monte Carlo, and bascially took the Cougar to task for being neither fish nor fowl.
There was no confusion about the Monte Carlo’s purpose. The Monte Carlo was a personal luxury car first and foremost, and it was well-suited to that mission.
Chrysler’s 1970 E-bodies had several problems. A big one was that the Challenger and Barracuda shared very few exterior body panels, but most people thought they were the same car with different grilles and taillights! The cars looked largely identical.
Plus, the Chrysler E body was the crappiest feeling car the company ever built. The door slam sounded as though the car was coming apart. The interiors featured big molded plastic panels everywhere. Cheap, Cheap, Cheap. Although the Cougar turned out to be the bigger rust bucket, it had much more of a quality feel, as did the 70-72 Monte Carlo.
The sad thing is that to my eyes, the Challenger and Barracuda were beautiful cars. Had they felt like and been built as well as the 68-70 B bodies (still not the highest of standards) these cars may have done better. Maybe we would have even seen a Challenger Brougham by 73 or 74. 🙂
there were 10 Kowalski edition 2011 SRT-8 Challengers built for Bob Frederick of New Wilmington Dodge in PA.
http://www.topspeed.com/cars/dodge/2011-dodge-challenger-srt8-392-kowalski-edition-ar108705.html
yes, excellent double bill. i think that the big problem with vanishing point is that it wasn’t intended to be that narrative but more evocative of the times, ala easy rider. also, most of us have seen it on broadcast tv where it was heavily censored. personally, i love it. how many other movies featured mountain with felix pappalardi on the soundtrack?
Vanishing Point turned out quite a bit better than one would imagine, considering that the low-budget movie was conceived as nothing more than when someone called the director and said, “Hey, can you make a movie using five identical, white 1970 Dodge Challengers that Chrysler is offering for free?”.
With movies, as with cars, working on a shoestring budget often forces everyone involved to be more creative. Some of the biggest turkeys in Hollywood history have been big-budget, star-studded productions.
Chrysler lavised money on the 1970 E-bodies, but did the 1970 Duster on a shoestring budget. There is no question that the latter was a more successful vehicle in just about every way at the time.
Ironically, the Duster (and its Dodge twin, the Demon/Dart Sport) wasn’t very popular with Chrysler executives. Although it was wildly successful, they didn’t like it because they felt (probably correctly) that many of those sales had been cannibalized from the much higher profit E-body.
It was double billed at the Bellevue Wa Drive(Bel-Kirk) In(1977). You got a discount if you brought a hot rod so I took my 57 Chev Shorty wagon. You could put the tailgate down and park backwards, and have some discrete adult adventures in sleeping bags while the movie played.
They are not so big when compared to the current Challenger which ARE big. The Challenger was a little bigger than the ‘Cuda and others in its class (Mustang, Camaro, Firebird) because it had a 2 inch longer wheelbase than the ‘Cuda. If you see any of the old parked next to any current muscle car they look tiny.
p.s. you gotta love the hurst style t-shifter.
Hurst inline shifter was THE gear to have once upon a time
No inspections eh sounds like South Australia now theres a rust bucket paradise but you tend to attract cops as soon as you cross the border but nice easy rego on any old bomb.
That girl certainly has a beautiful pair of… eyes. Yeah that’s it… eyes.
I’m sorry was there a car in the last picture?
I read she made a career of costuming some major motion pictures. Ironic that a lady most remembered for being naked was responsible for designing clothes.
Seems like people are pretty down on these, but Brock Yates I guess liked them so much he ran a modified one in a Cannonball. They didn’t win.
I’ve always liked the looks of the challenger, never found the ‘Cuda as nice since it WAS shorter and I think it hurt its looks somewhat due to the truncated rear end.
That said, sad to hear they weren’t well built but it seems ALL 3 US makes had hit and miss build quality with some more consistently worse than others and continued toe downward spiral until they had nowhere else to go.
That said, seeing this rust pocked example still being driven is a feat in itself as when I spot them, they are usually restored.
I think it was 2 years ago that I spotted a purple grape stock Challenger restored going up I-5 towards Seattle as I drove home, or at least it was going N. bound in any case.
I think it was equipped with AC as it had the 2 center dash vents, which were often missing on cars of this ilk back in the day if they didn’t have AC and just made do with the 2 outside vents for fresh air.
“brainless, imbred white trash”
I am immersed within a horde of those entities.
Very scary but the shantys are super cheap and property taxes low.
And, luckily, the vermin are generally aware that an Old Coot has little to lose and that a life sentence means little to one with a foot and a knee already within the grave and what with an impending retirement of extreme frugality, hunger and unrelenting physical impairments with little to no medical solace retirement years within a prison are a viable option.
It does tend to impede the natural inclinations of the hordes of local scum, vermin, trashy filth.
Great article! I owned a 1970 Challenger in Plum Crazy. I rusted out by 1980 and was toast. Worst handling car I ever owned. Still miss it, though.
Thanx for the repost, David. “Vanishing Point” occupies a significant place on my personal history as well because, at the time, I was actually working as a used car transporter although I was based in New York City. I was 21 years old and had been doing the job for about a year when the movie was released.
We generally ran locally with occasional runs to Boston, Albany, Philadelphia and out onto Long Island. On a busy day, we could make four of five separate local runs, easily covering 200+ miles. I rarely had a ride to pick up a car or back to the shop after I dropped one off, so I honed my hitchhiking skills over the three years I did the job. The older guys would use mass transit and I would beat them to our destination more often than not. And yeah, you haven’t lived until you hitchhiked Manhattan island. Hey, it was the 1970’s and you could actually DO stuff like that.
Anyway, the point of this comment is to relate that one of the best drives I did on that job was a mini-Kowalski banzai run in a genuine 1970 Cuda AAR (if you don’t know what that is, Google it) from Kingston, NY to NYC on the Northway in just under an hour (that’s 100 miles) shortly before the movie was released and lived to tell the tail, unlike the aforementioned Kowalski. You could actually DO stuff like that in the 1970’s, too.
Rode around in one of these with 340/6-pack/slap stick when they were current. It was no more rattly than other cars back then. I liked it a lot.
They still look good when they get shopworn. Around here there’s a convertible with a somewhat patched white top, lady is probably original owner, she has a smile when I see her. Probably one of the best man-attractants she could have. And it would filter out the kind of man who believes everything they read online, who are likely no good in bed.
My brother bad one of these. 70, RT, 383, torqueflite, purple with black vinyl top. He would not maintain it at all, other than an oil change. It had 14 bias skinny tires, black stock rims, (after the tires on the Mag 500’s went flat) The windshield was cracked, the fender was hit, and the left door and quarter got hit. by a VW beetle. He was paid for the damage, but blew the money. He put it in the rear garage, it sat in there for 18 years, and he would not let me have it to get it back into shape. But he was going to “restore it” soon. Through the 70’s he was a drug addict, and 80’s, lived in the bottom of a Jack Daniels bottle. He sold it to a guy that gave it a good home in 1996. He had it since 1974. I hate it when idiots get such cars, but just destroy them. Damn, I wanted that Dodge. I was doing the body and paint work to an AMX, and Camaro at the time, I could have adopted this poor Dodge and added it to the lineup. I am still pissed about the Challenger to this day.
Great to see this, missed it the first time around. A lot of good comments too.
Even if its rough, nice to see a car like this that’s actually being used. Fun to speculate on it’s story. Gene Herman’s comment on being a used car transporter is fascinating as well. Wondering if there might be some more stories there.
One thing that often gets overlooked, especially today comparing the new Challenger with the new Camaro and new Mustang, is that the Challenger was always a big car. Really, all around, to me the current Challenger’s styling is more true to its roots than the others. It’s not for everyone, but that’s part of what makes cars and the car hobby so fun and interesting.
I like both the old and new Challengers, and currently own a 2010. Great fun, and simply fantastic for long road trips (“…leaps vast prairies at a single bound”, as an ad for the original suggests). A ’70’s Challenger, though, is still very much on my wish list.
Agreed. I always roll my eyes when I see downsizing the Challenger suggested when reading new car websites, as if it’s deviated from it’s roots. The Challenger is actually the only “ponycar” that actually hasn’t, the Mustang and Camaro have become way too impractical and sports car like for my taste.
Following up years later, but it’s ironic that the 1970-74 E Bodies and the soon to be discontinued LC/LA platform share lineage with the Dodge Charger. I’ve read in books about the E Bodies that some of the structural elements were also used in the 1971-74 B bodies. The current Challenger uses a platform derived from the LX/LD Charger and 300.
I traded a 2013 Mustang on my current 2018 Challenger. The Challenger is a physically bigger, roomier car than the Mustang because it is on a bigger platform. It’s also more comfortable to ride in and drive. And comparing a 1970 Challenger to a 1970 Mustang would show the Dodge was dimensionally bigger back then as well.
My run in the AAR Cuda is certainly the most memorable of my experiences, but I’m afraid the passage of time and my increasingly unreliable memory have obscured most of the details of those halcyon days.
A few things that come to mind are my first and only ever drive in a Ferrari (a 250GT from the early 1960’s), a tire-smoking entry into unyielding NYC rush hour highway traffic (the Cross Bronx Expressway) in a big block Corvette and a late-night Banzai run to Boston with a buddy in two identical and nearly new 1971Lincoln Continental coupes during which I discovered that they were capable of 100 mile per hour cruising, too.
One last memory isn’t drive related. It’s of a small group of low profile guys who would walk up and down the street where all the wholesalers were located all day pushing small tool boxes mounted on wheels and equipped with long handles.
I worked there for quite a while before finding out that they were the wizards who could turn back the hands of time on tired old Fords, Chevies and Plymouths by rolling the odometers back without removing the speedometers from the dashboard. They could kick a clock back in as little as five minutes working from under the dashboard with special tools they often made themselves and were treated like royalty. They could clear $500 in cash in a good week, all tax free and under the table of course, REALLY good money those days.
Great to read. Must have been fun and interesting times.
Vanishing Point a formative movie. I guess that depends on your age and your circumstances. In 1970 for me it was 17, Vietnam and the movie M.A.S.H. for very obvious reasons.
Sad to see a nice car in such condition.
The fad of jacked up rear ends in Alberta during the seventies led to a law under the Motor Vehicle Act banning such a practice. The law stemmed in part from fatal collisions where cars that were rear-ended burst into flames since the gas tank was in the very back of the vehicle.
My older brother always seemed to end up buying worn out oddball type cars. In 1979 or so he became the proud owner of a somewhat rusty worn out 1970 Challenger.
What was interesting about this Challenger was that it was an upgraded SE edition with a nice interior with overhead console and small back window.
Yet it was powered by a Slant 6.
I saw the movie a long time ago, and it was over when I realized I didn’t “get” most of it.
I know memories aren’t always accurate, but all I remember is…
A lot of “uppers”, a cool car that sounded like it really needed another higher gear, everybody all sweaty/dirty which seemed to be a 1970 fashion…
And who rides a horse naked?
I’ve been on one a few times, and it’s a little rough on the buttocks with pants ON.
Was chafing and callous-butt as sexy as sweaty/dirty in 1970?
I was alive in ’70 but busy being a baby.
Still am!
She rode a motorcycle naked, not a horse. Question of logic still stands of course.
It’s an interesting movie, it’s unquestionably a feature length Dodge commercial, but pretty much as coherent as other existential late 60s early 70s movies like easy rider(I like Vanishing Point better to be honest). I’ve watched it probably five or six times for me to get it, now that I get it I realize it’s still as anticlimactic as it was on the first viewing lol US releases had a scene deleted with a young charlotte rampling where she was clearly an angel of death, which ties into the otherwise unexplored supernatural element of the radio DJ communicating to Kowalski telepathically, or naked motorcycle girl knowing everything about him, it’s a weird scene but it somehow makes the whole movie work more cohesively.
Guess my memory was worse than I thought.
I appreciate your insights.
I once read an article on the making of the movie, and it stated that, riding around on a motorcycle, naked, in the middle of the day in the desert sun, the girl suffered some quite serious sunburns in a very private area of her anatomy.