That car has been in a museum in Auburn Indiana for years
Unfortunately for us, the huge glass fastback Valiant Barracuda didn't look anywhere near as sporty as the Mustang. The Barracuda looked like a Valiant with a huge glass fastback tacked on while the Mustang looked...unique and sporty - nothing like it's Falcon roots. If you liked the convertible Mustang you wouldn't find a comparable Barracuda for a couple more years. Of course you could always have ordered a Valiant convertible...
If Chrysler had dropped one of their big success stories (Duster sold 217,192 in it's first year alone, not counting the rest of Valiant and Dart sales) to prop up the sales of the E-body? That would have been a pretty big gamble for them.
I’m just saying if they would have dropped the A body period for 70 I wonder if the sales for the E bodies would have greatly increased. It’s crazy how the 70 duster basically outsold everything Chrysler had in the two-door lineup But now, when you tell somebody you have a duster, they are like yawwwwn.
No they wouldn't have as the Duster was way cheaper and likely outsold the E Body on price just as they sold a ton of RR's. I think the 340 Duster base price was around $2500 new.
They are great to look at, but were not so great to drive daily when they were just cars. Case in point - the member who sold me my former Hemi GTX had a Challenger as his first Mopar back when they were still affordable. After he bought it he found out it virtually impossible to do a wheelchair transfer with it, and sold the car a month later. He switched to second generation Chargers, and had no issues. Chrysler quality control wasn't the greatest back in the day, but I remember the E bodies being especially bad. But like rare baseball cards, their fragile nature left a small number of valuable examples.
I’ll look for the write up in this car, but here’s the facts that I can remember. It did not start out as what you see here, I believe it was a BH Barracuda, and like the ad says, it was sent over to be disassembled to write the warranty repair book, when it was reassembled, a different list of parts were added to finish the warranty book to include those options. Then it was destined to be destroyed, but instead was given the VIN you see on it, and sent to Poinsette Motors, a small dealership in northern Indiana to be quietly sold. Not even the factory would destroy a Hemi car when they could get some money for it, although they did scrap more than a few pilot cars back in those days. A buddy of mine worked at the proving grounds for his entire career, and lots of cars were wrecked there and set out back for reference, should something come up on a car line that had to be addressed. He told me that a couple guys got fired and he was demoted to midnifht shift for using a few of those Dakota R/T’s and putting together a yard dog. It didn’t help that they flipped the truck, and the EPA was called in due to the leaking fluids from the accident, which blew the whistle on their escapades.
