A friend of mine just bought a '74 Dart as a restoration project (yes, here in Czech Republic, it makes sense to restore a four-door 74 Dart) and he's got some trouble decoding the fender tag - he used online decoder here

It says that J42 option should be the pistol grip - but it's an automatic Dart. Also, it says bench and the car has buckets - does it mean the seats had to be replaced, or it could be a mistake (from the "pistol shifter" bit it seems that the decoder was developed for something other than a '74 Dart...

Here's the fender tag:


And if anyone's interested, here's the whole car.
http://custom1.rajce.idnes.cz/1974_Dodge_Dart/#

From looking at the interior picture I see the bench seat mounting holes are plugged and the holes where the bucket seats were mounted do not have the reinforcement plates that the factory used to help support them on the floor. My 74 Dart sport had a bench and the holes for the buckets were marked but never punched out and there weren't plates in the locations.

I would say the bucket seats were not factory and i don't see any console mounting brackets on the floor so the shift knob is probably a mistake

and A bodys never had P Grips..

One of the reasons on line decoders are so unuseful is they fail to distinguish WHEN certain codes meant certain things. Codes changed from year to year.

According to the white books, J42 did mean pistol grip shifter in 70-71.

By '74 J42 probably means some sort of accessory or dress up item on the car. It could be tied to an A code package. I don't have the information readily available as to what J42 could be tied to but I will look later.

The code can be found on US tags, so it is not unique to Export (I code) cars.

We also have to consider that Windsor plant (R code) does use some codes not normally found on US sold cars decode information.