Youth MOVEMENT
In 1968, a car company naming one of their vehicles after a cartoon character was a pretty ballsy move, but that’s exactly what Plymouth did when they released the ‘Road Runner’.
Taking its name from the Warner Bros. cartoon character that was a staple of kids’ TV back then (and continued to be for decades afterwards), the Road Runner was the perfect moniker for a car designed to appeal to young buyers. But there was more to the Road Runner than just a cool name.
BUDGET BALL-TEARER
Like most of the Detroit automakers in the 1960s, Chrysler Corporation had seen the emerging “youth market” but didn’t know the best way to appeal to it. At the time, Chrysler had something of a “dad’s car” reputation amongst young buyers and Plymouth was even less cool.
What young buyers were interested in were muscle cars, but most of these were priced out of their reach. The solution, Chrysler believed, lay in combining the sort of high-powered drivetrain that young buyers were looking for with a basic “intermediate” (mid-sized in US terms) bodied car they could afford.
There are a lot of opinions over what was the first muscle car, but you can make a strong case for Plymouth producing the first “budget” muscle car in the form of
