Dodge Charger

About

As of 2026, it's 58 years old.

In 1968 Dodge took the boxy first-gen Charger, threw it out, and replaced it with one of the most flat-out gorgeous shapes ever stamped from American steel: a Coke-bottle fastback with hidden headlights, a flying-buttress roofline, and a stance that looked angry standing still. It was the muscle era at its absolute peak, and the Charger wore it better than almost anything else on the road.

Under that long hood sat Mopar's heavy artillery: the standard 440 Magnum made a thumping 375 hp, but the holy grail was the 426 Hemi, a $605 option ordered on just 475 of the 17,582 R/Ts built. It hit cinemas as the villain that out-drove Steve McQueen's Mustang in Bullitt, then spent the 1980s as the most famous car on television.

Because here's the thing: an entire generation knows this car not as a Charger but as the General Lee, the orange 1969 Charger that jumped, slid, and Dixie-horned its way through The Dukes of Hazzard. Over 300 of them were wrecked making the show, with as few as 17 surviving. That's a lot of beautiful muscle cars sacrificed to the gods of Friday-night TV.

Dodge let the nameplate die, then revived it in 2006 as something heretical: a four-door sedan. Purists clutched their pearls, but the LX Charger brought the Hemi back to the masses, and the later Hellcat versions turned a family sedan into an 800-plus-horsepower tire-vaporizing menace. Sacrilege, sure, but the fast kind.

Dodge Charger through the years