The Dodge Challenger might rest on a 14-year-old platform being on sale since 2008 and have a motor that both sounds like a dinosaur and runs on them, but it’s officially the tyrant king of the muscle car scene for the second straight year. Recently revealed 2022 sales figures from the big three show that it smoked competition from the Ford Mustang and the Chevrolet Camaro.
That’s notable for a whole host of reasons, not least of which is the fact that both the Camaro and Mustang are far more modern. The Camaro was last fully redesigned back in 2016 while the current Mustang platform came out a year earlier in 2015. Since those times, each one has seen numerous hardware and software improvements.
The Challenger hasn’t rested completely on its laurels but it’s certainly leveraged its old-school cool styling and drivetrain to the full. Dodge is the only one of the three to offer its muscle car without a fuel-efficiency-focused four-cylinder engine. Despite that, it led the three in 2022 with 55,060 Challenger sales. Ford came in second by selling 47,566 Mustangs and Chevrolet was far behind with just 24,652 Camaro sales in 2022.
More: Dodge To Unveil Final Last Call Challenger Special On March 20th
Interestingly, of the three muscle cars, Chevrolet ended up with the largest increase in sales over 2021 with a 12 percent bump. Ford is the only one of the three to see a drop off in popularity, a 9 percent drop off, from last year’s high of 52,414 units. Some of that might have to do with the fact that buyers could be waiting for the all-new 2024 Mustang to make its way to dealers.
The Challenger and its four-door brethren the Charger accounted for the only increase in sales that Dodge experienced this year. The Durango was down 12 percent while the rest of the lineup basically went out of production. It’ll be interesting to see how things shake out for Dodge over the next year or two.
We expect to see the wraps come off of the very last “Last Call” Dodge Charger later this year. Once it and the Challenger leave production, Dodge will need to migrate its customers to a largely new lineup with new technology.
