Does this 10-car lot of E-body Challengers hold your next project?
A Facebook Marketplace listing for a massive lot of E-body Challengers and associated parts just caught our attention. The group of 10 cars is comprised of eight 1970 Challengers (the inaugural year for the Dodge E-body), as well as a 1971 318 automatic and a body from 1972–1974. The cars, in various states of disassembly, could prove to hold several restorable examples, or at least some that could be returned to the road after significant effort. The caveat is that the seller, located in San Antonio, wants to sell the entire collection of cars, and their substantial accumulation of E-body parts, in a single $100,000 transaction.
We saw the listing thanks to a post on Barnfinds.com, where sales like this one are often posted, although this listing’s focus on first-generation Dodge Challengers makes it particularly interesting. Among the Challengers listed, at least a couple are said to be fairly well-optioned, including a green-on-green 1970 R/T equipped with a 383 and an automatic; there is also a 1970 equipped with a Rallye dash, disc brakes, a numbers-matching 340 Performance Pack, and rather desirable Plum Crazy paint.
No doubt the seller has their reasons for wanting to offload the collection in one fell swoop, as dealing with multiple buyers and the associated logistics sounds like a nightmare. However, it won’t make the sale easy. The listing, posted 14 weeks ago, is still up, so despite the tempting hardware, there can’t be that many buyers with the funds and the space to give this collection a new home. Without a whole lot more photos, it’s tough to comment on the value of any of the individual projects, although with all of those parts for such desirable cars, it’s possible that a buyer could recoup a lot of their investment if they had the time and the means to get all the parts in front of the right audience at a Mopar swap meet.
As always, we’re hoping to see some of these desirable and beautiful cars back on the road. If you or anyone you know ends up with one of these mothballed Mopars, please let us know. Happy hunting!
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When they are this far gone you do it for love. But with that said I would rather have one of these vs a new Challenger.
All a buyer needs is 40 years and a million bucks to realize the dream.
And that’s the truth of it, unfortunatly. The days of buying a $1500.00 shell and having it put on the road for another $2000.00 are good and gone. Just like the good old days are good and gone. And that applies to all-Chevy,Ford, Mopar, AMC and anyone who thinks that just because they can do the work theirself it won’t be that way are wrong as hell. It’s just how it is these days.
To me these are lost causes but I don’t have unlimited funds.
Buy the lot of them and you might be able to piece together 90% of a rolling chassis.
It’s always a shame so many people let the cars get so bad before they decide to sell them.
Wow. I have a 70 convertible with factor air and power windows, very rare, but only has 318. And a 74 Rallye with a 440 (obviously not original). Both are auto. The 74 has rust and I am going to have it restored and I am expecting to spend 30K and it is 1,000 times better condition than those 10 cars! At 100,000 that’s 10K per car and each will need another 40-50k! That’s why they r still available after 14 weeks. But I do hope somebody buys them and at least gets a few of them back on the road…
It’ll never sell for $100k.
Graveyard Carz south ?
“Does this 10-car lot of E-body Challengers hold your next project?”
Nope.
As a reader/follower of many of the car magazines and forums, I’m always amazed at the number of MoPars that people have, usually at obscene expense, rehabbed. Like this cache, they seem to have expired ‘young’, but got hoarded somehow. My buddies Challenger, back in the ‘seventies, seemed like an old car; things breaking, falling off, looking shabby well before what should have been it’s time! The driver’s bucket seat back had broken in half on one side, and he had to keep a thing of 2×4 wood to hold it up (fell off once, too: exciting!), the upholstery was split with foam showing everywhere, half the dashboard was loose or busted, and the paint deteriorating rapidly. Typically, it still ran pretty strong, tho! So those ‘early death’ E-bodies seemed to ‘new’ to scrap, and people saved them in faint hopes of ‘fixing’ all the plethora (Jefe!) of issues that they seemed to ‘be all broke-out in’! Valid?
My uninformed guess is they’re being sold as a lot to bring the apparent average value up. Some of those shells may be worth $10K but without pictures of the floors I’d bet most are too far gone to save.