What do you make out of this nonsense....? 304 Mile Daytona. 675k FIRM! lol

[69_500]

Whoever buys it will have one heck of a Daytona. Personally I would drive it, as I can't stand the temptation of having a wing car and not putting miles on it. It would have 4,000 miles before the summer would be over. I'd drive the wheels off of the car. Which is why I wouldn't want that one. I want a Daytona but I would honestly prefer a non numbers car so that I can drive it and enjoy the heck out of it.

[PocketThunder]

Here is some interesting reading and photos regarding the 304 mile Daytona on the Daytona Superbird Auto Club website.  I have also added a couple of new articles on the "What's New" page. 

http://www.superbirdclub.com/elmer.html

that photo is taken out side elmers house.  Elmer has a model A in his living room which is the room with the window behind the wing on the daytona.     I was there in 1994.  He has a couple barns full of old cars and old toys and a shed full of muscle cars.  He has or used to have open houses on weekends for all to come and look around for $2 or something.
I dont remember seeing this Daytona when i was there back then.  I do remember seeing his low mileage Lime Green superbird though.  he had that one on display in one of the sheds..Maybe i'll take a nice sunday drive with my Charger down the mississippi river road and go see him again this summer.

Paul
in St. Paul

[Charger-Bodie]

i also live somewhat close to elmer and the story that i got about the color is that he actually had his super bird first and the daytona was a leftover ect but that he had it painted lime light to match his bird ...... at any rate id paint it black no doubt about it and oh yes those mile  are very likely real ive only seen the car once it was at a larger indoor carshow about 15 years ago.....and by the way the inside of the trunk is still black

[Aero426]

i also live somewhat close to elmer and the story that i got about the color is that he actually had his super bird first and the daytona was a leftover ect but that he had it painted lime light to match his bird ...... at any rate id paint it black no doubt about it and oh yes those mile  are very likely real ive only seen the car once it was at a larger indoor carshow about 15 years ago.....and by the way the inside of the trunk is still black

I believe he did have the Superbird first, and that's the way I understood the story until Gary Moe came forward.  Gary has owned a Daytona for 30 years, and credited his interest developed after seeing Elmer's car on the dealers lot in his hometown.

[tan top]

 

Was that Tim Winnie's RT/SE?

     

                   yep    thats  the guy (Ghoste)    the car was sold new in Arizona               
           
   

Here is some interesting reading and photos regarding the 304 mile Daytona on the Daytona Superbird Auto Club website. I have also added a couple of new articles on the "What's New" page.

http://www.superbirdclub.com/elmer.html

       

                       thanks for the link  (Doug) ,  intresting stuff .  them  mail box letters .  intresting that the painter said he never painted the wing .. 

[69_500]

I haven't heard the name Gary Moe before.

Side note here but Doug, how many origional Daytona owners still have their cars? I can only think of 3 off the top of my head. 1 in Missouri, Elmer, and one HEMI owner. Are there more? I know of more Superbird origional owners than that. Just not so many origional owners of Daytona's.

[Aero426]

Gary has been in DSAC since 1977.   He has a nice R4 Daytona with a white stripe.  That car he's had for 30 years.   He sold his Hemi Challenger a few years back to buy a Superbird.   He hasn't been to a lot of meets, but I expect there's a good chance we will see him and his wife Cindy at Milwaukee in August.   It's not too far of a drive for them to make it. 

[Ghoste]

Interesting observation Danny.  In spite of the much larger volume of Superbirds available of course, I wonder how much of it is a timing thing?  Didn't the Daytona's all sell fairly quickly?  With all the stories I've heard of Superbirds sitting around on lots for years, I wonder if it was just generally a car where more of the buyers were buying it because they truly loved the car and it's styling.  As opposed to the Dodge where maybe (MAYBE) a lot of buyers were getting one because it was an impulse thing based on the 1969 performance fever swan song thing?  Only a half baked theory.
Made more interesting by the fact that the stylists were granted access to the Plymouth but not the Dodge?

[PocketThunder]

I haven't heard the name Gary Moe before.

Side note here but Doug, how many origional Daytona owners still have their cars? I can only think of 3 off the top of my head. 1 in Missouri, Elmer, and one HEMI owner. Are there more? I know of more Superbird origional owners than that. Just not so many origional owners of Daytona's.

This summer i am going to try and go see my friends Uncle who i'm told is and original Hemi Daytona and Lime Green Superbird owner in Wisconsin about an hours drive from me.  I'll report back when i get the info

[Aero426]

Interesting observation Danny.  In spite of the much larger volume of Superbirds available of course, I wonder how much of it is a timing thing?  Didn't the Daytona's all sell fairly quickly?  With all the stories I've heard of Superbirds sitting around on lots for years, I wonder if it was just generally a car where more of the buyers were buying it because they truly loved the car and it's styling.  As opposed to the Dodge where maybe (MAYBE) a lot of buyers were getting one because it was an impulse thing based on the 1969 performance fever swan song thing?  Only a half baked theory.
Made more interesting by the fact that the stylists were granted access to the Plymouth but not the Dodge?

A couple of points to make here...

In round numbers, if you have 2500 wing cars to sell,  the first 500 are going to go pretty easily and quickly.   The best tongue in cheek Chrysler quote I heard about the Daytona and THEN having to turn around and build 2000 Superbirds, was that "We pretty much tapped out the idiot market with the Daytona".   Superbirds were a harder sell, well, because there were more of them to unload.

Styling had nothing to do with it.  Then as now, folks would argue which was the better looking. 

Superbirds sitting on lots for years?   That's pretty much bull, and an urban legend that just won't die like "all those dealers that took the noses and wings off".    Isolated instances?  Yes.    But very few.   

It's my opinion that the dealers who had cars left over into 1971 were those that WANTED them to be left over.  Either they liked the car and wanted it a bit longer, or more likely they enjoyed complaining to the zone rep about how the car had been dumped on them from the sales bank and how saleproof they felt car was.   

Bob and Sharon Malcolm are good examples of my point above.  As a small dealer they would have liked to have kept the Superbird they had, but could not afford to just absorb the cost.   Then as now, car dealers do now want to continue to pay floorplan financing every month on a piece of dead inventory.   More likely, if worse came to worse, they'd dealer trade the car, or just blow it out. 

The 268 mile Superbird that came out of Clinton Iowa in 1973 was a situation where the dealer just used it as leverage with his zone rep, possibly to get concessions somewhere down the line.   It wasn't so much as he couldn't sell it, as that he WOULDN'T sell it.   And he sold it for full sticker in '73.

[Ghoste]

I know I'm going to sound dumb here, but, if the cars were good sellers, why would the Malcolm's need to worry about dead inventory?  Doesn't dead automatically imply a poor seller?

[Aero426]

I know I'm going to sound dumb here, but, if the cars were good sellers, why would the Malcolm's need to worry about dead inventory?  Doesn't dead automatically imply a poor seller?

I am not picking on you here, so don't assume I'm going down that road.   

I never said they were good sellers.  I said they managed to get most of them sold over the normal period of time.  Cars were moved around to markets where they would tend to do well.  From the summer of '70 on there are examples of cars being heavily discounted.  By the fall there were not a lot of cars left.  In Milwaukee which is not exactly the hotbed of NASCAR racing, the last Bird in the area left the lot in September of '70, and THAT one they saw the young buyer coming and nailed him for full sticker.   Lucky for the owner, he still has the car and got the last laugh.

Dead inventory implying "hard to sell", or "we're stuck with it",  is something any dealer would fear for a special 1970 car still on hand in 1971 on the books at full boat value.  While you as the dealer are paying for the car monthly on your floorplanning, it's going down in retail value by the month.  So until the time that you as a dealer found the "right buyer" looking for a new year old Superbird,  you were in a world of hurt.   Keep in mind there was no internet where you could just dial up a car as a consumer.   If you were in Alabama and wanted a new Bird in '71, it'd be pretty tough to find our hypothetical car sitting there in Peebles Ohio.   Again, the incentive for car dealers is to move the product quickly, not sit on it.   Even the dealer of the Limelight Daytona, clueless as he was to selling high performance did whatever he thought he could do to get the car sold, which to him meant painting it a bright color.     

Anyway, back to the example of the Malcolms, their case was that financially, they could not keep the car, no way, no how.    It never went beyond that. 

[hemigeno]

"We pretty much tapped out the idiot market with the Daytona".   

Classic...   

[resq302]

Funny, I have heard the same thing about the new Charger Daytonas.   

[Ghoste]

I didn't think you were picking on me, I just wasn't able to follow your logic in the other post for some reason.  Since I had never found that in one of your posts before, I just figured it was a brick in my head someplace.  I see your point now and the internet analogy helped clear it.  I worked in dealerships a decade after the aero cars and of course we had microfiche then to help locate cars so I'm assuming that resource may not have existed in 1970 either.  No matter, I also know that dealers HATE finding cars someplace else.  Sell from stock is the order of the day.

So why has this urban myth grown then about the cars languishing on lots?

[hemigeno]

So why has this urban myth grown then about the cars languishing on lots?

Probably because lots of people back then DID think the cars were unusual, bordering on hideous (see "idiot" comment above).  It would logically follow then that the cars were a tough sell.  A few isolated incidents of cars sticking around for years, despite the reasons why that might have been, over time becomes embellished to the point that you'd think these cars were albatrosses that none of the dealers wanted.

I think Doug is right - the cars were usually not great sellers, but they probably weren't as bad as some of the urban myth stories made them out to be. 

If the internet had been in place years ago (gee, I thought Al Gore was around back then), they might not have had near the problems getting rid of them.  I know of one owner who explained that when he went to buy his Daytona at a St. Louis dealership, a bidding war erupted in the dealership's showroom which almost led to a fistfight.  He ended up paying way over sticker price for his Daytona.  You just don't hear as much about high-demand stories like that, which might be just as common as the "albatross" variety.

[Aero426]

So why has this urban myth grown then about the cars languishing on lots?

In my opinion, the myth has grown because somebody knew a friend who heard from someone else that it happened.   In other words, a lot of hearsay.   

For the sake of discussion, lets say that there were 50 unsold wing cars left over at the end of 1970, which on the surface sounds like a lot - one car for every state.  That's still only two percent of total production. 

[hotrod98]

In 2005, my wife bought a new Go-Mango Ram Daytona pickup. My wife loves wingcars and this was her replacement...for now. The owner of the Dodge dealership here was worried that the Daytonas wouldn't sell so he discounted it pretty heavily. With my son's employee discount that amounted to around 8k off of sticker. As the end of the year came around, all of the Daytona trucks that he had on his lot sold, but there were still a quite few around the country that didn't sell and I just saw a new one on E-bay last week. Some models just take longer to find their market.
My point is, I don't think the Superbirds were any less successful than many of the cars selling today. I think that they just stood out so much back then that people assumed that they didn't sell because they were undesirable.

[69_500]

So Doug is there a good percentage of origional wing car owners still in possesion of their cars? I've met a few over the years, but not a whole lot. Granted the majority of them will be starting to get up in age now. But I like hearing of people holding on to these cars for 25+ years. Because to me that says they love the cars for what they are, and not for financial means or gains. They bought the cars when they were just a used or new cars. And still have them.

[Aero426]

So Doug is there a good percentage of origional wing car owners still in possesion of their cars? I've met a few over the years, but not a whole lot. Granted the majority of them will be starting to get up in age now. But I like hearing of people holding on to these cars for 25+ years. Because to me that says they love the cars for what they are, and not for financial means or gains. They bought the cars when they were just a used or new cars. And still have them.

For the guys who have owned them for so long, the financial part tends to be less important.  Certainly it's a nice thing to have in your back pocket, but dollars are not the driving force it seems to be for some people.    Certainly it seems there are more Bird original owners or "early adopters" than for Daytonas.  An original Daytona owner is a rare Bird.    

[Ghoste]

Any theories?   

[69_500]

Well I'm certainly glad that you still have the 2 wing cars that your dad owned Doug. I wish like heck I had the same opprotunity to have 2 of my dad's old cars. Like your father he had quite a few, and hey and 2 of them would be fine by me.

I know this for sure. I'll be passing which ever ones I get on to my son.

[daytonalo]

The bottom line for me and most of us poor people is , keep grinding , fitting , sanding and spending our milk money to build a clone , just my two cents . Larry O

[Ghoste]

Milk money?  Damn!  That's why the wife and kids all start to moaning and complaining every time I go to the garage.  I'm gonna teach 'em to drink water instead, hahaha. 

[Old Moparz]

For the guys who have owned them for so long, the financial part tends to be less important.  Certainly it's a nice thing to have in your back pocket, but dollars are not the driving force it seems to be for some people.    Certainly it seems there are more Bird original owners or "early adopters" than for Daytonas.  An original Daytona owner is a rare Bird.    

I agree with the financial part being less important, my friend with the 2 Superbirds is proof. He's had the lime 6 Pak one since 1973, & the white 4V one since the late '70's. A limited budget keeps either car from being a show car, & the only way it could happen would be to sell one to restore the other. That's not an option according to him, so the white one is a nice driver while the lime one awaits some work to get it on the road again. People ask about buying them & they are not for sale at any price.

He & his friends had nothing but high performance Mopars when these were new. They could only afford a used one at the time, but whatever they found they drove the hell out of & got another when they wore it out. They were fairly cheap & easy to get back then because they were abused gas pigs. If I had been a few years older than I am, I bet I'd have been doing the same thing. What a difference 5 or 6 years makes on what was considered a used car. Based on what I own now, I don't think I'd part with one either.