Why was 440 not a Road Runner option?

harrisonm said

Does anyone know why the Road Runner never had the 375 HP 440 as an option? I was guessing that it might have been something like an attempt not to compete with GTX sales. I realize that the 390 HP 440 6-pack was an option, but I am talking about the plain old 375 HP 440.

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Jack Smith and the Plymouth Road Runner

They called back and it turned out to be like a 47-cent penalty over what we were already spending for horns, so we had a horn. Sure, we said we’d buy that little bit of “plus;” at least I say “a little bit.” People in the industry would drive each other up the wall just to save a dime on a car. But a dime times a couple hundred thousand cars is a lot of money! In that case, we would have done a lot to save a small amount of money on each car. Cars are implicitly the product of a lot of cost reduction: coldly looking for pennies, trying to get the money out so we can be a competitive company and sell a car for a competitive price.

But we had the horn and it almost fit into the car. The horn was held by one bolt. There’s a little tab that goes into one hole and there’s a second hole for the screw that mounts the horn. That hole in the horn bracket was about 5/32 of an inch long. So we had to have them move that hole that little distance and moving that hole that little distance was the biggest tooling cost ($243 out of a total of less than $500) associated with the production of the Road Runner car!