When I was in college 30 years ago, I found a '71 'cuda 340 advertised in the local paper by its original owner. The owner was a wealthy middle aged Chicago north shore suburb resident who bought the car off the showroom floor of the nearby Chrysler-Plymouth dealership. It was FC7 with a black vinyl top and white interior. Front and rear elastomaric bumpers, front and rear spoilers, fog lights, AC, AMFM, power windows, and automatic. Almost forgot to mention the factory window louvers! The car only had 29,000 miles on it and still rolled on its original 70 series tires (on rally wheels). Completely stock and I only paid around $1900 for it.
That was all the good news. The bad news was that the owner, Mr Fat Cat, drove the car primarily as a commuter car to the nearby train station for his daily trip downtown where he was a lawyer or something. The 2 miles or so daily round trip combined with our climate where they dump tons of salt on the roads every winter had taken a serious toll. At some point 4 or 5 years before I bought it, he'd taken it to a body shop where they had replaced both front fenders and patched the rear quarters with about a ton of bondo, even bondoed over the gap between the rear quarters and rear valence panel!
Then they repainted the car in white to cover their sins I guess. I bought the car intending to have some body work done and then repainted to its original FC7, but when I took it into a bodyman to start working on it, he called me up a few days later and said I needed to get rid of the car. He told me the floor was rusty and the subframe had some rot, and the car was unrepairable. I'm sure in this day of age someone like Alan would have gotten ahold of it and done their magic to bring it back to life, but in 1983 that wasn't in the cards. I still shed a tear thinking about how cool that car would have been if I could have restored it!
My convertible is pretty unique too. The production of '70 Challenger 383 four barrel convertibles that weren't R/T's was pretty small, 137 or 138 IIRC, I'd have to check my records for the exact number. Factory exec car with the Q in the VON, loaded with power options, and no one ever cloned it into an R/T, which is what happened to the majority of the handful of other JH27N0B cars I've seen over the years. Fortunately this car survived and is in good shape, only driven in nice weather and the rest of the time sits in a nice dry garage!
