Was This Plymouth’s Plummet from $1.65M to $418K a Reality Check?

Bird, it seems, is not the word. At least it wasn’t at the Mecum auction in Indianapolis last weekend. There, a Tor Red 1970 Plymouth Superbird sold for $418,000. It’s a solid number at first glance, quite close to what one of these high-flying Hemis is worth in our price guide.

But if you look a little into this car’s history, you’ll see that it sold for a record-breaking $1.65M just three years ago. Ouch. What happened?

Plymouth Superbird history actually starts with Dodge. Aiming to put the Charger at the front of the field in NASCAR racing in 1969, Dodge gave its Charger R/T heavily reshaped bodywork with a gigantic pointed nose and ludicrously tall rear wing. In a not-so-subtle nod to its NASCAR intentions, the new winged wonder was named the Daytona. For homologation purposes, Dodge built 503 total Charger Daytonas, and one of the racing versions was the first thing in NASCAR to hit the 200-mph barrier.

The Superbird, based on the Road Runner, was Plymouth’s follow-up to the Daytona a year later. Slightly refined but largely similar, it was the car to beat in the 1970 season. The series banned these “aero cars” for ’71, though, so the Superbird’s flight was short-lived.

Its time in the showroom was short-lived, too, but not as successful. By the time the Superbird debuted, homologation rules changed from 500 cars total (as with the Daytona) to one car produced for every two dealerships. For Plymouth, that meant nearly 2000 Superbirds. It may have looked just like the car you saw winning at Talladega, but as a street car it looked ridiculous, even cartoonish, with those massive Road Runner decals. It was impractical given the length of its overhangs, and it was expensive to buy and to insure as rates started to hit the muscle car market hard. Superbirds were a hard sell, and there are tales of cars languishing on dealer lots until 1972.

But that was then. As classic cars today, the ridiculousness of the Daytona/Superbird twins is part of their appeal for Mopar maniacs. The race history is, too, and practicality isn’t much of a concern, either. These days, nobody is parallel parking a Superbird and trying not to bash in that giant schnoz.

Of the nearly 2000 Superbirds built, just 135 left the factory with the range-topping 426-cubic-inch/425-horsepower Hemi. A little more than half (77) came with a TorqueFlite automatic. The rest got a 440-ci V-8 of either 375- or 390-hp output. Generally, colors can make a big difference in Superbird prices, and four-speed cars can command about 10% more than their self-shifting peers. In our price guide, Superbird values peaked in 2023, then dropped and have been flat for the past year, though they’re still comfortably higher than they were pre-pandemic.

The car sold at Indy, chassis RM23R0A172589, is a nicely restored and genuine Hemi car, and one of the 77 equipped with an automatic. When we saw it up close at Barrett-Jackson in 2022, it was the star of the sale and looked fantastic other than a few blemishes and cracks on the nose, as well as a few chips on the hood. But even if it had been better than perfect, the $1.5M winning bid ($1.65M with premium) was beyond top dollar for a Superbird at the time.

It was also (still is, actually) the most anyone ever paid for a Superbird at auction, squashing the previous record of $990K set a few months earlier. It was even higher than the then-$1.32M record for a Charger Daytona, which is a much rarer and typically more expensive car. Even in the super-heated pandemic-boom market of mid-2022, this was an extreme case of auction exuberance.

At the time, we called the result an “attention-getting outlier,” and it looks like we were right. No other sale since then has come close.

The buyer, car collector Bobby Knudsen, sadly passed away last year. His collection sold at Indy, featuring several mouthwatering muscle cars and historic drag racers, among them not one but two Pontiac Catalina “Swiss Cheese” cars. The ex-Jim Wangers one brought a very strong $742,500. The Superbird, however, flew lower at $418K. It even brought less than another clean Hemi/automatic car, this one finished in Lemon Twist (yellow), which sold for $605K.

If a $1.232M drop in price sounds drastic, that’s because it is. But that doesn’t mean muscle cars or even Superbirds specifically are crashing. As mentioned above, $418K is close enough to what other Superbirds have sold for recently, and although their values are down from their peak a few years ago, the huge gap in prices for this one is mostly down to it flying way too high in 2022, and then coming back down to earth in 2025.