Why Rock the Boat?
Plymouth product planners were given $15 million to freshen up the dowdy little Valiant for 1970. Nobody told them they could spend the money to create a slick, new fastback coupe. Then again, nobody said they couldn’t. Fall 1959. Dateline: Detroit. New car buyers eagerly anticipate the bright new compacts promised by the major American manufacturers. Designed to do battle with the likes of Volkswagen’s Beetle while answering social critics who say that the standard Chevrolet, Ford, and Plymouth, have grown too large and heavy, the Big Three bring forth an eclectic array of smaller cars. See more classic car pictures. And so begins the story of the 1970-1976 Plymouth Duster.
But this process, while beneficial, also had unintended consequences. To learn more about the design of the 1970 Plymouth Duster, continue on to the next page. With their beefier chassic parts, the new Barracuda and Challenger were more costly to produce, a factor that contributed to their good-die-young demise in April, 1974. Worse yet, they weren’t quite fast enough. In case you have just about any concerns regarding exactly where as well as the best way to work with Selling Prices, you can email us at our internet site. Before the 1970 Plymouth Duster was introduced to the marketplace, Plymouth had a lighter-weight, compact car that could carry a 340 in 1968 and 1969 — in the departing Barracuda.
Dodge dutifully spent its allowance on grafting new fronts and rears for the Dart’s four-door sedan and two-door hardtop bodies. This was the make that fanned the flames of “Dodge Rebellion” in its advertising, but a more literal insurrection was raised by Plymouth’s product planners. Why rock the boat? Instead, the planners clandestinely conspired with Plymouth stylists to bet the entire $15 million on a longshot outside the corporation’s sacrosanct product plan. Instead of spending their money touching up the Valiant sedans, former Plymouth compact-car planning executive Gene Weiss said they decided to spend “nothing — zip, zero, nada” on the carryover cars.
General Motors takes on the Beetle directly with the rear-engine Chevy Corvair, while Ford’s conventional Falcon is a scaled-down version of the larger Ford. Fall 1969. Dateline, Detroit. The fresh Maverick is destined to be Falcon’s replacement. Of the trio of new compacts introduced with such hope and promise a decade earlier, only Valiant remains, with its best days still ahead of it. And all because of a cute two-door fastback with the unlikely name of Duster. Sooner or later, almost everyone owned a Plymouth Duster or knew someone who did.
They were everywhere, as ubiquitous as toast. Continue to the next page to learn more about Chrysler’s 1970 compact car models. With its one-two punch of the Plymouth Valiant and the slightly larger Dodge Dart, the Chrysler products regularly took 30 percent or more of compact sales, a percentage far in excess of its approximately 16-percent share of the overall market. Since its introduction. Valiant had been restyled twice; once in 1963, and again in 1967, when its wheelbase was stretched out to 108 inches. This page introduces the 1970 Chrysler compact cars. By the latter 1960s, Chrysler Corporation had successfully established itself as the major player in the compact-car segment of the American market. And the crazy thing is the Duster was never supposed to happen.
But with the 1967 rework. After subsisting on grille and taillight tweaks for 1968 and 1969, Chrysler product planners budgeted $30 million — split evenly between Plymouth and Dodge — for facelifting the Valiant and Dart (designated internally within Chrysler as the A-bodies) for the 1970 model year. Valiant was pared to just two- and four-door sedans, surrendering its notchback two-door hardtop and convertible to its sexier sibling, the Barracuda.
