The is a muscle car that’s been around in its current form , and . But Dodge sold more than twice the number of Challengers in the U.S. market in 2019 as it did in 2009, when the car still qualified as “new.” That makes the Dodge Challenger a modern marketing marvel, both for its sheer sales numbers and for making us all perpetually forget how old it is.
Fiat Chrysler its Q4 and annual sales results on Friday, which listed Challenger sales at 14,298 quarterly and 60,997 annually. That’s roughly where sales were in 2018 as well, but the more important comparisons come when you look toward the beginning of the decade, around the time when the Challenger returned to the market for the .
Back then, when the car was actually “new” to the U.S. market, sales were less than half of what they are now. Here’s how Challenger sales have trended over the years, which can be easily summarized as “up”:
Sales of have risen, too, but not as much. The company sold 60,651 of them during the , compared to 96,935 .
The Challenger came to the U.S. market at a hard time for gas-guzzling fun cars, because it was just around the Great Recession. But the fact that it’s managed to not just stay relevant for more than a decade, but more than double its U.S. sales numbers, is a testament to just how obsessed we all are with wasteful, old, no-care muscle cars so long as Dodge keeps tossing more and toward us. As of , Challenger sales were ahead of the Chevy Camaro but behind the Ford Mustang, and the average buyer age for the car was 51.
No matter which crowds or age groups are buying the Challenger, though, it’s still being bought—by a whole lot of people. That’s a wild statistic for a vehicle so similar to the one that was on the market more than a decade ago, especially when the modern car industry claims to be all about “” and “.”