Dodge Timeline: The Beginning Of The End For Muscle Cars

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The automaker is being aloof, but here's what we know...

It’s unofficially official, the wildly popular and successful Dodge Challenger and Dodge Charger are done as we know them. At some point next year, if you believe the rumors, you and I will wake up in a world where these glorious modern muscle cars are no longer being produced. Our children/grandchildren will never know what it feels like to spec out a new Charger or Challenger, or go test drive a brand new one at a dealership; trust me kids, there’s nothing quite like buying a new car. It seems like just yesterday my group of car friends were sharing around memes about how other car makers are watering down their performance lines, Dodge/Stellantis is out there putting Hellcat engines into everything. Oddly enough, it seems that the big bullies with the strongest sales numbers for a few quarters now, are going to be the first ones out. So, how did we here? Let’s go through the timeline.

Stellantis Lands In Early 2021

Fiat Chrysler Automobiles (FCA) joined French automaker Peugeot PSA to create Stellantis. We were just getting used to to the idea of Fiat being attached to the Chrysler brand, and it took us a few tries to learn the proper way to pronounce “Stellantis” after the announcement. Electrification was already being mentioned in the early days, but fed to us in a positive way, in a ‘don’t worry guys, if there is an EV, it’ll run alongside the current gas engine cars you love!,’ way.

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SRT Disbanded

I’m not going to spend a ton of time because this topic was exhausting to our team. The same month Stellantis announced their merger, the SRT department was disbanded. Their narrative was that the SRT magic would be spread around to other models, but that doesn’t make sense, now here we are.

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Dodge Releases Muscle Car Theft Deterrent, But Doesn't

Stellantis announced they would roll out a security update to include an additional layer that would deter theft. After a few weeks went by, we did some investigative journalism and interviewed Dodge dealership service managers about the update, they knew nothing about it. To this day, when I call to inquire, I just confuse the service department, but they do inform me that there’s a recall on the catalytic converter on the Hellcat, so bring it in to put a more restrictive one on my car - miss me with that one, Dodge dealership.

What does this have to do with the current rumors and likelihood that the ICE muscle cars are going away? It was around this time when I started to lose faith that Dodge could develop and deliver anything that would outperform against Tesla, when they couldn’t get on the same page about a simple software update, or maybe they just don’t care?

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Stellantis Sets An Electrification Deadline

So electrification plans were confirmed, but the timeline was set for 2025, which seems about right, but not all of their cars were going to be plug-in. 71 of 110 nameplates under the Stellantis umbrella were going to be EVs, but remember that Dodge barely accounts for that. Around this time, the EV Wrangler was exciting the masses, but I’ve yet to see one on the road, have you? I’ve been told they exist, but are very rare and expensive. Living in a metro area with Teslas accounting for a chunk of cars I see everyday, I’m a little surprised I haven’t seen even one, what’s up with that?

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Dodge Rolls Out A Super Cool Car Guy EV Video

This is where things get weird. Out of the thin blue sky, Tim Kuniskis, your token totally friendly, super relatable, average Joe, dad-type CFO of Dodge, appeared in a video that talked about the brought future. In the video was a shadowy vehicles doing a four-wheel burnout, featuring a retired Dodge logo. My memory of this is a little murky, but maybe that’s because Dodge turned around and removed the video within the following two weeks.