Say what you will about the Dodge Challenger getting a little gray around the temples, but 2018 represented this aging and formidably cool muscle car’s best-ever sales year. Unfortunately (or fortunately for Ford), the old-school nameplate couldn’t outsell America’s pony car: the Ford Mustang.
In a clear message that buyers don’t care that the Chally has been in the same generation since its 2008 comeback, Dodge sold 66,716 Challengers in 2018, just barely beating its previous record of 66,365 units in 2015 according to Fox News.
Clearly, the introduction of the Demon—touted as the most powerful American production car—and higher volumes of the Hellcat have been beneficial to the Challenger not only in terms of horsepower and burnout abilities but also in sales.
These high-powered variants are not only sales winners, but they’ve successfully created a halo effect over the lower-level Challengers making them remain desirable after all of these years without a major update. It’s also worth noting that the AWD Challenger GT was recently introduced which makes it the only American muscle car with the snow-friendly drivetrain option.
Speaking of other American muscle cars, the Ford Mustang is unsurprisingly the sales winner among the trio with 75,842 units sold in 2018 which is a 7.4 percent dip compared to 2017. As for the Camaro, which we know has been struggling, Chevrolet only managed to sell 50,963 of them in 2018, a significant 25-percent plunge compared to the previous year. It’s almost as if people have spoken in terms of that facelift.
It will be interesting to see if the upcoming introduction of the Mustang Shelby GT500, a direct competitor to the Challenger SRT Hellcat, will have an impact on the Challenger’s sales. How much longer can the Challenger survive on its old platform? Only time will tell…and sales will tell.