DODGE

Charger

The Dodge Charger began life as a 1964 show car before reaching showrooms in 1966 as a sleek fastback built on Chrysler's intermediate B-body platform, complete with a full-width grille, hidden headlamps and a distinctive sloping roofline. Those first 1966 and 1967 cars sold modestly, but everything changed for 1968, when the Dodge Charger was reborn with a curvaceous "Coke-bottle" body, a tunnelled rear window and flying-buttress rear pillars. Demand exploded, and Dodge built over 96,000 of the 1968 cars against an initial forecast of 35,000. The Dodge Charger quickly became a performance legend thanks to the R/T trim, which offered the 440 Magnum and the fearsome 426 Street Hemi V8. For 1969 the range gained the Charger 500 and the winged Charger Daytona, an aerodynamic homologation special built to dominate NASCAR superspeedways, where it became the first car to break 200 mph on an oval. A restyled third generation arrived in 1971 with the SE and Super Bee variants, before tightening emissions and insurance costs gradually softened the Dodge Charger into a more luxurious personal coupe by the mid-1970s. Immortalised on screen as the orange "General Lee" in The Dukes of Hazzard and as the villain's car in Bullitt, the Dodge Charger of 1968 to 1970 is today among the most collectible and valuable muscle cars of the golden era.