Jeremiah 29:11

I like reading articles like this as it news in anticipation of the 2008 Challenger.

October 4, 2006

Challenging Hemis and history

Prices for the legendary 'Cuda and Challenger continue to grow higher.

Jerry Garrett / New York Times

Nearly 20 years ago, Barry Washington stumbled across an unusual used car, a 1970 Dodge Challenger T/A. He didn't know much about it, other than that it had cool racing stripes, wild orange paint and a motor born for racing.

He bought the car, though he recalls thinking that the price, $6,500, seemed far too high. So began a new life for the driver and the car, whose value today is comfortably in six figures.

About five years ago, Washington found a way to garage his car -- not long after he found out how valuable it had become.

Prices for Challenger T/As, along with a whole generation of Challengers and Plymouth Barracudas, have risen exponentially in recent years, particularly since DaimlerChrysler announced in July that it would bring back the Challenger in 2008.

Washington's research revealed that the 1970 Challenger T/A was a racing version of Dodge's belated entry into the muscle car wars. Only 2,518 are known to have been built; Washington knows this because he has become perhaps the top authority on the cars. He now heads the Challenger T/A Registry (challengertaregistry.com) and is the spiritual leader of a group aficionados seeking to locate T/As or document what happened to all of them.

"The holy grail of the muscle car world is the '71 Hemi 'Cuda convertible -- just because so few of them were made," said Steve Davis, vice president of the Barrett-Jackson Auction Company. "That's King Kong. After that, it would be maybe the '70 Hemi 'Cuda convertible, then the hardtop versions of those cars."

What does Davis mean by holy grail? The current auction record for a '71 Hemi 'Cuda convertible (one of fewer than a dozen made) is "well north of $2 million," he said. He predicts that this record will be easily and repeatedly broken in January when a bumper crop of Dodge and Plymouth muscle cars go on the block at Barrett-Jackson's big auction in Scottsdale, Ariz.

Chrysler enthusiasts like to point out that the company was the first with a pony car -- its Plymouth Barracuda was introduced on April Fools' Day, 1964, and was in dealerships a few weeks before the Ford Mustang. But Ford fans scoff, asking how there could have been a pony car before the Mustang, progenitor for the class, even went on sale.

In truth, the Barracuda was a pre-emptive strike; the Mustang's impending arrival was well-known, so Chrysler quickly cobbled together a fastback version of its Valiant compact, adding a huge glass rear window (dubbed the fish tank).

More than a million Mustangs were sold in just 18 months. Total Barracuda sales over 11 years never topped 400,000. (Its later-arriving cousin, the Challenger, accounted for 200,000 more.)

Not until the 1970 model year did Chrysler come up with fresh ground-up designs for pony/muscle cars, and by then the era was winding down. Within four years, Chrysler decided to discontinue them.

Yet their lack of marketplace success has helped to make Barracudas and Challengers coveted collectibles.

The cars had already earned a spot in pop culture. The Challenger was a star in films from "Vanishing Point" (1971) to "2 Fast 2 Furious" (2003). While the Barracuda had a cleaner, classier design, resurrecting that nameplate would have been problematic, given that Chrysler phased out the Plymouth division four years ago.

[b]Instead, Dodge unveiled a design study for a reborn Challenger at the Detroit auto show in January. By summer the car had a green light for production. "We hadn't seen this kind of spontaneous, passionate response to a car since the introduction of the Viper concept in 1989," Thomas W. LaSorda, president of the Chrysler Group, said.