By 1971, the muscle car era was winding down, but Chrysler Corporation was still in the game with the Plymouth Road Runner, now boasting all-new sheet metal. 

The Plymouth Road Runner is one of the great marketing stories of the Motor City car biz. Chrysler product planners shrewdly noted that young buyers in the exploding muscle car market weren’t really into luxury and appearance features. These gimmicks just added extra cost, not to mention needless weight at the drag strip. No, the kids were mainly interested in performance, with a performance image to match.

So for 1968, the Mopar product team appropriated a key piece of pop culture—the familiar Warner Brothers TV cartoon character, the Road Runner—and applied it to a stripped-down Plymouth B-body coupe. Priced at under $3,000 complete with 383 CID big-block V8 and all the necessary supporting hardware, the Road Runner was a smash hit, selling more than 125,000 units in the first two years.

By 1971 the muscle car era was winding down, but Plymouth was still in the game with a completely redesigned Road Runner with a one-inch shorter wheelbase and swoopy new sheet metal by Plymouth studio manager John Herlitz, who also styled the popular 1970 Barracuda. The killer 440-6 and 426 Hemi options were still available, but sold barely a handful. Now the base engine was a weakened 383 with 8.5:1 compression ratio, and a 340 CID small-block was offered for the first time. Sales had fallen down the proverbial mineshaft, from a peak of nearly 85,000 units in 1969 to around 14,000 in 1971. But the Road Runner image messaging was still right on target for ’71, as shown in this spot featuring the Warner Brothers cartoon stars, Wile E. Coyote and Road Runner. Video below.

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