Description by Nick Taylor, owner of PantherPink.com.

This 1969 Dodge Super Bee first came across my desk in 2014 when it was posted on Facebook by Sam, the son of the original owner, who was seeking some information on it. His father had bought the car new at Jim Soutar's Dodge City in Barstow, California. Sam told me that they were cleaning up his father's property and the car had been sitting there for many years. His father was elderly and not really able to provide much information about the car or how it came to be. He did have several snapshots that included the car when it was the original color.

As time went by, the story evolved into the car being a pilot car for Panther Pink. Since I had not inspected the car in person and there was no documentation of this fact, I was not able to support the owner's claim of this. Since the car had 99 on the fender tag for special order paint, it was obvious that the car was originally painted a special order color. Typically that would be a color offered by the manufacturer but not on the particular vehicle you wanted. It could be a color offered in the past or even a color from another manufacturer. What would be unusual is for it to be a color that hasn't been created yet.

Going by the pictures it was hard to match it up with Panther Pink as the car had been repainted red at some point and the exposed original paint was either very faded or too small to compare just in a picture. Panther Pink is a very hard color to photograph and show on a computer screen accurately. Since we both lived in Southern California, I offered to come and check the car out and bring my large collection of Panther Pink paint chip charts to compare the color. This never came to pass with Sam for various reasons.

Sam had told me that he intended to restore the car in honor of his father. I suggested he take extensive photographs of the car during the process to document it for the future. At some point later, he decided to sell it. He again wanted me to confirm that it was a Panther Pink test or pilot car but there was no way I could do that. Even if the color matched, without documentation from Chrysler, this wasn't possible. Later he told me that he had gotten an expert to verify his claims. I talked to this person and they stated that they only told him that it looked like the car was originally pink but not that it was a factory Panther Pink test car.

The car was for sale for a while and I got many inquiries from interested parties wanting to know if the claims were true. I could only provide what I knew, that the car obviously was painted pink from the factory but there was no documentation proving the claim as a test car. Eventually the car was sold and I heard from the new owners asking the same question and I gave the same answer. The new owners invited me to come and inspect the car if I was ever in the area. It took a couple years but in February of 2020 I was able to finally see the car in person.

The car has been partially disassembled and was being stored in a shipping container. Several areas of the original paint were now exposed. I was able to compare the paint to my chip charts and it was not a match but it was easy to see that the car was originally painted pink. So the mystery of its creation remains. Interestingly, the owner also had an original FM3 Barracuda project car in his collection and even though the paint was faded on that car, I was able to demonstrate how it matched the paint chip charts perfectly.

The current owner plans to fully restore this rare 1969 Dodge Super Bee back to it's original state and color match the color to the original. And seeing the other cars in his collection, I can imagine that the car will be spectacular when finished.

Paint chip compared to original paint.