Only malaise-era kids will remember the Dodge Li’l Red Express pickup truck was the quickest performance car that America could muster in the post-oil-crisis economy. Just listen to these blistering performance figures; 255 horsepower, 3748 pounds, 7.8 seconds 0-60, 16.1 second quarter mile, and 13 miles per gallon. Oh, how the mighty had fallen. The company churning out drag-strip monsters just a decade prior couldn’t even manage to make a big block fast in 1978, but at the time nobody could. Strict emissions and consumption laws made even performance cars like the Corvette anemic and slower than this pickup. A loophole in the environmentalist laws allowed Dodge to build a fast truck because anything with a gross vehicle weight rating over 6,100 pounds didn’t need to follow these laws. So a hopped-up hot-rodded 360 cubic-inch V8 went in (the standard truck had 160 horsepower), and the weird performance truck was born.
And it was immediately a sales flop. Americans just didn’t want hot nasty speed anymore. Because of state noise laws, the smoke-stacked pickup wasn’t legal for sale in California, Florida, Maryland, Oregon, or Washington state, and because of its stratospheric $7,400 MSRP (around $38,248 today) price tag, and audacious look-at-me aesthetics, Dodge simply couldn’t sell them. Can you even imagine an America where an over-the-top pickup truck all about going fast wouldn’t sell out in the first month? Late 1970s America is a completely different country to what we’re living in now. Just 7,306 examples were sold in ’78 and ’79, before the project was taken out back and strangled.
Express yourself
Like all other Li’l Red Express trucks, this one started life as a D150 Adventurer truck, a half-ton, 2WD, stepside. Every one of them was painted red with oak wood accents and gold stripes with lettering on the doors. To make more power on a budget, the Dodge engineers raided the V8 parts bin. They started with a police-package high-compression 360ci engine as the base, added the camshaft and valve springs from a late 1960s Charger, a thermo-quad four-barrel carburetor, a dual-snorkel air cleaner, and the aforementioned exhaust stacks. All of that fed through a milquetoast, though mildly modified, Torqueflite 727 automatic transmission.
This particular truck is presented as basically brand new, with just 49,098 miles on the odometer. Sonny Schwartz purchased the truck for his famed “Suzy Q” collection in 2014 and it has driven just seven miles in the last 11 years. That’s a crying shame, and they should be admonished for the disgusting treatment of this fine automobile. Now it’s coming up for auction at the RM Sotheby’s Hershey, Pennsylvania sale, and I implore you, oh fair Li’l Red Express buyer, take it from the grip of the unworthy and go forth to rack up miles on this erstwhile muscle machine.
Just imagine, this truck being out and about on the road, even for weekend trips or something, could have brightened the day of some young child, momentarily tearing their attention away from the pocket-sized and portable idiot box’s bright colors and algorithmically addictive legal gambling shoved into their faces from sun up to sun down. This truck could have created a new car enthusiast simply by driving past and being cool. Do it, and not just for the ‘Gram.
