Final Parking Space: 1972 Plymouth Duster

Our previous few Final Parking Space cars have been imports (one Italian, one Japanese, one German), so now it’s the turn of a patriotic American machine that was born in Hamtramck, Michigan. Yes, a genuine A-Body Mopar, now residing in a Denver-area self-service car graveyard.

It seems fitting that this Plymouth will spend its final days parked right next to a Dodge of the same era: a Mitsubishi-built 1973 Colt hardtop coupe. It’s possible that these two cars were sold out of the same dealership.

The Duster name was applied to the pseudo-fastback coupe version of the Plymouth Valiant for the 1970 through 1976 model years. Its Dodge Dart-based sibling was the Demon, later renamed the Dart Sport.

The Duster offered car shoppers a great deal in an affordable sporty compact and it proved to be a huge success for Chrysler. For the 1972 model year alone, nearly 230,000 Dusters drove out of American Plymouth showrooms, outselling the ordinary Valiant by better than a 4:1 ratio.

The hottest version of the Valiant family for ’72 was the Duster 340, with its 240-horsepower engine. This car was built with a two-barrel 318, rated at 150 horsepower.

Since the curb weight of the V-8-equipped 1972 Duster was a mere 2920 pounds (quite a bit less than the weight of a 2024 Toyota Corolla, for example), 150 horsepower made it reasonably quick. Keep in mind that 1972 was the year that Chrysler switched from gross to net power ratings; the same 318 engine with slightly higher compression (8.8:1 versus 1972’s 8.6:1) was rated at 230 horsepower a year earlier.

The base transmission in the 1972 Duster was a three-speed column-shift manual transmission, but the original buyer of this car opted for the three-speed automatic. A four-speed manual was available as well, which would have been a lot of fun in a 318-powered A-Body.

I came of driving age in Northern California during the early 1980s, and 1970-1976 Dusters, Valiants, Darts, Scamps, and all the rest were everywhere in my automotive world. I’ve owned, driven, ridden in, and/or wrenched on more members of this Chrysler A-Body generation than I’d ever be able to recall now, and I love them dearly to this day. Every so often, I get the urge to buy a solid early-1970s Valiant sedan and put a built-up 360 and manual transmission in it.

This car is in rough shape, though the rust isn’t so bad. Someone swapped a Gold Duster fender onto it at some point; there were also Feather Dusters, Silver Dusters, Duster Twisters, Space Dusters, in addition to Duster 340s and 360s.

Chrysler revived the Duster name on trim packages for the Volaré, Turismo, and Sundance later on, but it just wasn’t the same. The Dacia Duster comes out of an unrelated naming lineage.

The build tag tells us that it’s a genuine Hamtramck car, built at the Dodge Main plant that gave birth to everything from outsourced Ford Model Ts to the final Plymouth Barracudas. GM bought the facility in 1981 and now builds EVs there.

The Ugly Kid Joe sticker on the dash suggests that this car last saw regular use during the 1990s.

There’s heavy body filler in the usual spots.

High Plains Colorado kills Detroit vinyl tops with great thoroughness, but we can see that this car once had such a roof.

This car might be worth restoring in Minnesota or Maine, where its lack of major rust-through would be a strong inducement (the same could be said about the ultra-rare Colt next to it), but there’s a glut of affordable projects in this sort of condition along the Colorado Front Range corridor.