Why The Plymouth Road Runner Was Cool And Then In 1975 It Instantly Became Uncool: Glorious Garbage

Right off the bat I feel like I need to mention that the intent of Glorious Garbage is not to exclusively feature Mopar cars, and yet it would be nearly impossible for me to prove that were you to look at the ones we’ve done so far. I get that. And, I do have other Glorious Garbage candidates here, but I got started on this one before it hit me it’s yet another Chrysler product, and, well, here we are. So, just trust that I will mix up our Glorious Garbage offerings, but for the moment we may as well revel in the glorious garbagosity of this car, the 1975 Plymouth Road Runner.

To understand why specifically the 1975 Plymouth Road Runner qualifies for Glorious Garbage status, we should refresh everybody on what the Road Runner once was. You see, even way back in 1968, automotive bloat was a thing, and it was noted that the original crop of muscle cars was getting more bloated and expensive. Plymouth understood the growing hole in the market, and filled it with a reasonably-priced, basic (as in vinyl bench seats, carpet optional, not too many options) muscle car, all about cheap fun.

Based on the Plymouth Belvedere, these cars had a special version of Chrysler’s 383 cubic inch V8, with heads that featured bigger intake and exhaust valves, which came from the higher-end GTX, along with stiffer valve springs, intake manifold and cam also snagged from the fancier sibling. In the Road Runner, the engine made 335 hp and 425 foot-pounds of torque, making the (relatively) lightweight car a genuine beast.

The Road Runner got even better in ’71, when it got the “fuselage” styling that Chrysler was doing across their lineup, making for a very imposing-looking and dramatic car:

Cheap, fast and fun is a pretty damn good formula for a muscle car, and if you want to crank up the whimsy by not just licensing a famously fast cartoon bird as a mascot, but engineering a horn to mimic its distinctive meep meep call, then even better. Plymouth was giving you a real-world cartoon car, and they were more than happy to remind you of that in their commercials:

That’s fun, right? Of course it is! And the Road Runner continued to be fun for quite a while, but inevitable bloating and emission regulation power-sucking took their toll, withe the car moving away from its cheap muscle car roots by 1973, and then, in 1975, the Road Runner was now based on the new B-Body Fury design, which was bigger and softer and more comfort/luxury focuses, and not really what you’d pick for a muscle car.

You can see the whole Fury line that Road Runner was now a part of here in this dealer training video; I have it cued up to the part where they show the Road Runner, but you can scrub back and see all of the ’70s bloaty, wallowy, velour-slathered goodness:

They also say “single headlights give a finished, quality look,” which is a hilarious thing to say, considering literally every car that didn’t want to spring for quad headlamps had the exact same setup. I guess they give more of a “finished, quality look” than just having empty holes where the headlights should be, sure. Seriously, those are the exact same lights as a Beetle or Gremlin or Pinto or Civic whatever. Man, they were reaching.

So, this was now the car being handed to the Road Runner team, who were told to, you know, make this feel like a muscle car. Take this soft, heavy, wallowy “personal luxury coupé” and somehow turn it into something it very much isn’t.

And, it really very much wasn’t. Out of 7,183 1975 Road Runners sold, well over half had the base engine, a sad 318 cubic inch V8 that wheezed out only 145 horsepower, and those horses were glumly shoved through a three-speed Torqueflite automatic or a three-speed manual. Sure, there were other engine options, a few 400 cubic inch V8s that could make 160 hp or 185 hp or even up to a decent 235 hp, but not too many of those really hot ones were birthed by the factory.

I admire what the designers were able to do with this thing to try and capture some of the essence of Road Runnerhood, especially because all they really had to work with were some decals and wheels. The hockey stick-shaped stripe that goes from the front corner and swoops up the B-pillar, then over the roof, is good, but what I really like the the referential creativity taken with what would have ordinarily been the biggest styling hinderance to making this thing feel sporty: that squared-off, sorta-Continental-style rear trunk lid design.

I guess that raised hive back there is supposed to suggest a spare tire hump? Even though the top is flattened? Whatever it was, it just doesn’t scream “muscle car,” so the decal people got really creative and did this:

See that? They’ve transformed that hump into something that suggests a painted-on-a-solid-wall tunnel, like the classic Road Runner cartoon gag:

There’s not a lot of wildlife other than the Southwestern Desperate Coyote that attempts to catch prey via trompe l’oeil, but Wile. E. Coyote is one of them. Of course, it never works, but that failure is perhaps the most iconic of the Road Runner recurring gags, so it makes sense to reference it on the trunk of the car.

As far as I know, it’s the only example of a tunnel being used as a decorative element on a car?

The Road Runner team was really, really trying here. In addition to the stripes, tunnel graphic, a little Road Runner badge for the grille that resembled a tarot card, and a few other Road Runner graphics, there wasn’t all that much to distinguish the car.

On the inside you could get those fun, Taco Bell-food-ingredients-colored Sundance seats, artfully arrayed on someone’s lawn in that picture, and you could get an optional “Tuff” steering wheel, complete with a nice round rubber pad to smack your forehead into when those brakes invariably locked up on you. You could also add a tach, If you didn’t mind sacrificing an oversize fuel gauge and two idiot lights.

Really, the 1975 Road Runner wasn’t that great a car to drive. It wasn’t that quick, didn’t handle well, and was overall a far cry from the back-to-basics Road Runner that started it all. But, it still had some appeal, not the least of which was the iconic Road Runner horn that was specially designed, using such tricks as aluminum instead of copper windings inside, no trumpet, and a mounting that allowed for more resonance so it could better emulate the trademark beep-beep (I always heard it as meep-meep) of the Road Runner.  It was even badged as “Voice of Road Runner”:

Here, have a listen:

There’s no question that from a muscle car perspective, the ’75 Road Runner is garbage. But, it achieves Glorious Garbage status because, dammit, they really tried, at least within their decidedly non-trivial limits. The graphics were clever, it had The Horn, and it just didn’t take itself too seriously. Having a nice one of these now would be kind of fun, and compared to the rest of Plymouth Road Runner culture, having a 1975 one would mean you had nothing to prove. You’re not going to have the fastest car, so who gives a shit? You’re there to have fun.

This car is a big tray of ball park nachos. The cheese is clearly the maximum level of FDA-approved plastic a human can ingest, the colors are all eye-searingly vivid, the peppers and whatever were probably grown in a lab, but, who cares? You’re gonna enjoy the crap out of it. I have a suspicion that’s generally how 1975 Road Runner owners feel, and I respect that.

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