Orders for the final production of the gas-powered Dodge Charger and Challenger muscle cars as they’ve been known for more than decade open at 9 a.m. Thursday at DodgeGarage.com.
The four-door 2023 Charger starts at $32,645, the same as 2022, and next year’s two-door Challenger starts at $30,545, $100 less than ’22. Flagship SRT Hellcat models, all of which will be Jailbreak models for 2023 to access the full menu of colors and features, begin at $70,035 for the Challenger and $78,340 for the Charger Widebody.
The Stellantis NV performance brand is offering transparency on the allocation of its “Last Call” lineup to give customers the best chance at getting a vehicle and to get the best bang for its buck with limited special editions paying homage to heritage vehicles. Production will end in December 2023 at Brampton Assembly Plant in Ontario ahead of retooling at the plant for an electrified platform. Dodge will launch its next-generation muscle car, an all-electric vehicle, in 2024.
“In the next 14 months,” Dodge CEO Tim Kuniskis said during a virtual briefing, “it’s going to be what I call the end of the era and of these Brampton-built cars, and it’s a pretty big milestone for us.”
The Horsepower Locator is Dodge’s answer to frustration from customers and dealers around special-edition releases in years past, Kuniskis said. This new tool contains the entire 2023 model year of production and to which dealers each vehicle will go. Buyers can identify retailers with allocation by searching based on zip code, model and trim level. Once the customer contacts a dealer, and it puts in an order for a vehicle it’s been allocated, the buyer will get an email confirming their vehicle will be built.
“We’re not allocating to customers,” Kuniskis said. “We’re still allocating to dealers. We’re not doing any kind of deposits, direct to us, no reservations, none of that stuff. All we’re doing is matching up customer demand with dealers with exactly where the car is going to be, how many they’re going to have, so that nobody comes to the end of the production cycle and says, ‘Hey, I had a deposit down in XYZ week for my car. Where’s my car?’ It’ll be very transparent.”
Dodge will update the tool Monday through Friday except on holidays for a few months. It only shows vehicles to order, with Kuniskis saying he expects them to start arriving to dealerships in the first quarter. The locator doesn’t have information about on-the-ground dealer inventory.
The allocation includes the six special-edition vehicles that honor a piece of the Dodge muscle car history to Dodge’s top 500 dealers, including locations in Canada, Puerto Rico and the Middle East. At most, those dealers will receive only one of each of the vehicles in a particular color with the $99,315 Challenger Black Ghost Hellcat Redeye Widebody and the $98,420 Charger King Daytona Hellcat Redeye Widebody being reserved for Dodge’s top 300 dealers. Qualifying retailers will receive between six and 12 special editions in total.
The others include the $63,590 Challenger Shakedown, $61,805 Charger Super Bee, and $66,190 Challenger Scat Pack Swinger and $69,690 Charger Scat Pack Swinger.
The allocation doesn’t include the “historic” seventh special edition that originally was planned to debut next week at the Specialty Equipment Market Association Show in Las Vegas. The reveal of the final buzz car has been delayed after the company exploded seven vehicles during normal production duty cycles.
“This is going to be a commemorative car,” Kuniskis said. “It’s celebrating a car that came before it, but unlike where the other ones all had whatever car they were built off — a Scat Pack, a Redeye, Hellcat, whatever they were built off of — they had the standard power that was in the car. This one was going to be the only one that we’re going to add some more power to and, quite frankly, we ran into some problems.”
Kuniskis says he think they’ve solved the issues, and he hopes to the vehicle will be shared in the first quarter of next year.
Since 2005, Brampton Assembly has produced nearly 3 million Challengers and Chargers with a total of 1 billion horsepower. That includes so far 250,000 Scat Packs, 80,000 Hellcats and3,300 Demons.
“There was no way,” Kuniskis said, “that we could let this time period go by quietly.”
bnoble@detroitnews.com
Twitter: @BreanaCNoble