The eighth-generation Dodge Charger, which has the difficult mission of replacing both the previous-generation Charger sedan and the Challenger coupe, is far from a commercial success.
Dodge only sold 7,421 units of the new Charger in 2025, its first full year on the market. That’s about ten times less than the almost 76,000 previous-gen Charger units sold in 2023, the LD generation’s last full year on the market—and that’s not including almost 45,000 Challenger sales in 2023.
Mind you, the 2025 sales figure is only for the all-electric Charger Daytona, as the six-cylinder gas model only started to ship in late 2025-early 2026 and was not included in the full-year 2025 report.
Dealers Simply Don’t Have Enough Chargers in Stock
That said, the new gas-powered Charger hasn’t rocked the sales charts either, with Dodge reporting only 1,672 gas-powered Charger sales in Q1 2026—2-Door and 4-Door combined. While the gas Charger outsold the EV model 7 to 1 in the previous quarter, the sales numbers are still too low, so what is going on?
Dodge CEO Matt McAlear believes there’s no need to panic as it’s too early to judge the Charger’s sales figures. “I’m still excited. I’m still bullish on this car,” he told The Drive. “I think it offers something that no one sees coming in the industry and it wakes up some mundane car segments that there’s not many of them left.” According to him, the main reason for which sales have not picked up yet is the short supply of Chargers.
While the 550-hp 2-Door Scat Pack started shipping in January and there’s an adequate supply of those, the executive noted that Dodge does not have an adequate supply of the 420-horsepower RT 2-door and 4-door.
That’s because those models only started shipping in the last 15, 20 days and they’re still on their way to dealers. “We don’t even have all of the models across all of our dealers yet,” McAlear said, adding that “as we move through the summer, we’ll see what we’re made of.”
The Future Is “Absolutely Bright” for the Charger
Dodge’s CEO also downplayed the view some people have that there’s not enough variety in the Charger lineup to entice buyers—i.e. no Hemi V8 and/or manual transmission.
“We got Scat Packs, we’ve got RTs,” McAlear told The Drive. “This is one year in. And if we’d said we would have launched that much stuff in the first generation car within one year, you would have laughed. So the future’s absolutely bright.”
He elaborated saying that one year into the launch Dodge already offers 670-hp Daytona, 550-hp Scat Pack, 420-hp R/T, two door, four door, and all-wheel drive variants—which offer a rear-wheel-drive mode as well.
While fans have every right to ask for a Charger Hemi V8, the truth is that six-cylinder engines made up the bulk of Charger and Challenger sales in previous generations. The Hemi became the preferred engine choice for Challenger buyers only near the end of its production run, while the majority of Charger customers always went for V6 models.
While the current lack of a V8 option is not the biggest problem for the current Charger, Dodge has hinted on several occasions that a Hemi Charger is on the way. For now, fans just have to be patient as Dodge needs to make sure it can source enough V8 engines before putting more Hemi models for sale.
