CarBrandLogos archive · Dodge · 1966

DodgeCharger

One nameplate, four completely different cars, and a stubborn refusal to die.

Photo: MercurySable99 · CC BY-SA 4.0

The story

A defining chapter in Dodge history.

Explore the ideas, engineering and context that shaped the Dodge Charger, then continue into its specifications and place in the marque's lineage.

Origins

The Charger began in 1966 as a fastback roof grafted onto the Coronet, with hidden headlights, a full-width tail light and four bucket seats. It was competent and it did not sell especially well. Everything changed in 1968, when Dodge restyled it with a coke-bottle waist, a recessed grille and flying-buttress rear pillars — one of the finest shapes American mass production has produced, and the version everyone pictures when the name comes up.

06-07 Dodge Charger SXT · IFCAR · Public domain

Design and engineering

Under the bonnet, buyers could go from a mild slant six to the 426 Hemi by way of the 440 Magnum, and the Charger became a central figure in the muscle-car years. NASCAR forced the next chapter: those buttresses and the recessed grille were aerodynamically disastrous at speed, so Dodge built the Charger 500 and then the Daytona, with a flush nose, a flush rear window and an enormous rear wing, homologated in road form purely so it could race. It was the first stock car to lap a closed course at over 200 mph, and NASCAR rewrote its rules to stop the winged cars entirely.

1973 Charger side · CZmarlin — Christopher Ziemnowicz, a photo credit would be appreciated if this image is used anywhere other than Wikipedia. Please leave a note at Wikipedia here. Thank you! · CC BY-SA 3.0

In production

Its screen career kept the shape famous long after the cars grew heavy and emissions rules strangled the engines: the 1968 Charger is the black villain's car in Bullitt, and a 1969 in orange became the General Lee, a piece of casting so effective that it became the most recognisable Charger of all. The name was then applied, in 1981, to a small front-wheel-drive coupé based on the Omni — Carroll Shelby developed the hot version, which was genuinely quick and completely unrelated to what had gone before.

'09-'10 Dodge Charger -- Rear · Bull-Doser · Public domain

Legacy

That 1980s Charger says something about the decade. Chrysler was fighting for survival, the platform was shared with the humblest car in the range, and the badge was applied because it was an asset the company already owned and could not afford to develop anything better. Buyers noticed, and the name was retired for nearly twenty years.

Chapter 5

Dodge brought it back in 2005 as a rear-drive four-door saloon on the LX platform, which enthusiasts objected to on principle and then bought anyway. Hemi V8s returned, then supercharged ones in the SRT Hellcat, and the Charger spent the 2010s as one of the last large, loud, cheap performance saloons on sale anywhere. The badge has since moved to electric and turbocharged six-cylinder power — the fourth complete reinvention of a name that has never meant one particular thing for long.

At a glance