Used Dodge Chargers for sale: years from 1966 to 1971

Dodge chargers were noteworthy for their shape and styling as it was for their performance.

1966 Dodge Charger 383

The Charger was Dodge Division’s answer to the fastback craze and it was dramatically different than all competitors when it arrived. It was big and wide, which gave it a distinctive “flat” look to distinguish it from other muscle cars. It combined MoPar’s bright, clean interior styling with some of the compagny’s best engine options to create a package that had no peers.

Dodge called its 1966 Dodge Charger a “Sports Sedan,” even though it was really a Sport Coupe. This was an attempt to widen its sales appeal beyondthe youth market and to stress its cargo-carrying abilities. With a full-size 117-inch wheelbase and 203.6 inches of overall lenght, the Dodge Charger was certainly roomy. And its 75.3-inch width didn’t hurt either. With seating for only four on its front and rear bucket seats, the Charger was not really sedan-like in the passenger-carrying category, either. Its real appeal was its sporty flavor.

1966 Dodge Charger 383 pictures

1968 Dodge Charger R/T 440 Hemi

Dodge’s R/T designation meant “road/track”. The 60’s was a time when youthful car enthusiasts drove their car to work at the grocery store five days a week just to earn enough to pay the loan they took out to buy a muscle car. Then on Saturday they took their supercarto the drag strip for some “track time”. The Charger R/T was pushed as a machine that was well suited for both purposes. Motor Trend Magazine summed up the look of the R/T model as “a Charger with a set of mag wheels, wide oval tires and a bumblebee stripe around its rear end”.

This was the only Charger model that you could get a Hemi in during 1968. The Charger R/T’s Hemi engine option cost $604.75 in 1968 dollars, which might explain why only 475 suchh cars were put together. Of the total, 211 had the four-speed manual gearbox, which wes a no cost option. Other available extras included a limited-slip differential for $42.35, a tachometer power brakes for $41.75 and front disc brakes for $72.95. Bucket seats and high-performance tires were standard.

One of the most famous 1968 Dodge Charger RT was the stealthy looking one that actor Steve McQueen drove in the motion picture “Bullit”.

Dodge Charger R/T 1969

The 1969 Dodge Charger RT didn’t change much from the 1968 Dodge Charger RT model. As Motor Trend Magazine put it, “That brute Charger styling, that symbol of masculine virility, was still intact.” (Of course, those were the good old days when you could say things like that, wich would be considered “politically incorrect” today, in the page of a national magazine!)

For 1969, the Dodge Charger grille was divided into two sections and the taillights were modified a bit. However, the fastback Dodge was basically the same good-looking beast as before on the outside. Amazingly, you could get the big fastback with a six-cylinder engine, but only about 500 of those were made. The balance of the cars carried some type of V8, usually a muscular version. Inside the Charger, the interior treatment, including the well-designed instrument panel, also had very few changes.

There was a large-faced tachometer and the instrument panel gauges were done in white on black to make them stand out very distinctly. The R/T was the high-performance version of the Charger. The name once again implied its reliability as a street car and its adaptability to weekend dragstrip use. The Charger R/T came only as a two-door hardtop coupe with a base price of $3,592 and a factory shipping weight of 3,636 lbs.

That included the 440-cid Magnum V8, with a four barrel carburetor, hooked to a three-speed TorqueFlite automatic transmission. Also included as part of the R/T package were low-restriction dual exhausts with chrome tips, heavy-duty manually adjusted drum brakes, F70-14 Red Line tires, the R/T heavy-duty handling package and bumblebee stripes. With a 3.55:1 rear axle, the standard-equipped 440-powered model (which came with a column-mounted gear shift lever no less) was found capable of running down the quarter-mile in 13.9 seconds at 101.4 mph.

The R/T was the only Charger available with the Hemi V8 engine again this year. The 426-cid/425-hp powerhouse had a $648 price tag in 1969. Charger R/T production went from the 1969 total of 17,582 units up to 20,057 units. A new option package for Chargers that was also available on the R/T models was the SE (or Special Edition) interior with leather bucket seats, lots of extra lights and wood-grained trim pieces. Sinking in popularity to 400 production units was the Hemi Charger R/T. Around 192 of the Hemi-powered cars had four-speed manual transmissions in 1969.

1970 Dodge Charger R/T

The 1970 Dodge Charger R/T continued to use the same semi fastback body that it had employed in 1969. Naturally, there were several minor trim changes to set cars of both years apart. The R/T (Road/Track) edition was again marketed as a higher-performance version of the basic Charger. It had a newly designed grille, a new loop-style front bumper, two hood scoops (one near each outside edge og the hood), big bolt-on sode scoops(with R/T badges) on the rear quarter panels and a choice of longitudinal or bumblebee racing stripes on the rear.

A new interior design and some wild new exterior body colors like Plum Crazy, Sublime, Go Mango, Hemi Orange and Banana Yellow were also featured. The 440-cid Magnum V8 engine was standard equipment, along with Mopar’s sturdy TorqueFlite automatic transmission. Other Charger R/T features included a heavy-duty 70-amp/hour battery, heavy-duty automatic-adjusting drum brakes, heavy-duty front and rear schock absorbers, an extra-heavy-duty suspension, three-speed windshield wipers, all-vinyl front bucket seats, carpeting, a cigar lighter and f70-14 fiberglass-belted whithe sidewall tires (or black sidewall raised-white-letter tires).

R/T model designations were also carried on the center of the rear escutcheon panel, directly below the Dodge name. All Charger R/T models included blacked-out escutcheon panels and large bumblebee stripes running across the trunk lid and down the rear fender sides. A hefty jump to $3,711 was seen in the price of the basic 440 Magnum-powered Charger R/T for 1970. Total production this year dropped to 10,337 units, including a mere 42 cars with 426-cid Hemi V8s.

Car Life reported, “They keep making the Charger go like stink and handle better than a lot of so-called sportsters.” For a big car, the Charger R/T packed a big wallop when it came to high-speed performance. Motor Trend did a comparison test between a 440-powered Charger R/T, a Mercury Cyclone GT and an Oldsmobile Cutlass SX in its April 1970 issue. The Charger test car had the standard equipment V8, which produced 375 hp at 4600 rpm and 480 lbs.-ft. of toque at 3200 rpm. It also had a 3.55:1 rear axle. The car did 0-to-60 mph in 6.4 secondsand covered the quarter-mile in 14.9 seconds at 98 mph. It also averaged 14.9 to 15.7 mpg, which was much better fuel mileage than the two other cars. The magazine liked the Charger R/T’s image and its race-bred heritage.

1970 Dodge Charger R/T pictures

Extracts from the “Standard Guide To American Muscle Cars 1952-2005“