1967 Dodge Charger: The Fastback Dodge Had Already Decided to Replace

Dodge's 1967 Charger brochure picked a fight on its third page. Under the headline "Stay ahead of the herd," it asked: "Why play around with pony-sized fastbacks?" The answer was to "saddle up" a full-sized Charger with a choice of five V8s from 318 to 440 cubic inches, and elsewhere the brochure called the car "America's only full-sized fastback." It was confident copy for a car whose first year Ate Up With Motor calls an underwhelming debut, and it was written for a body whose replacement had already been approved. The 1967 Charger was a second season for a first idea.¹

Ate Up With Motor's history lays out how early that decision came. The design that became the 1968 Charger was mainly the work of stylist Richard Sias, a former GM designer hired by Dodge styling manager Charles Mitchell in 1964. Before leaving on a European trip in mid-1965, Bill Brownlie ordered the clay model destroyed; while he was away, Elwood Engel saw it and backed it, and Brownlie could not stop the project when he returned. Sias later credited Engel with the flip-up gas filler. The design went to Chrysler's Corporate Product Planning Committee in the summer of 1965, before the original Charger had even gone on sale.¹

That original Charger had been introduced on January 1, 1966, in Stellantis's heritage account, as Dodge's first production fastback: a Coronet chassis under its own body, with a fastback roof and full-width taillamps drawn from the Charger II show car, four bucket seats and a full-length console. For 1967 Dodge changed little. Over-Drive and the Stellantis history agree on small turn indicators on the front fenders, a few new pieces of chrome and a new vinyl-roof option, while a collapsible steering column and a dual-circuit master cylinder became standard.^2,3

The brochure sold the Charger as a car of many moods. Its opening spread, "Lash out at lazy luxury cars," promised that the fastback carried four in stride and hauled wagon-sized loads with the rear seats folded. A detail page showed the concealed headlamps that rotated into view, the full-width band of rear lighting across the tail, and optional wheel covers styled like mag wheels. Over-Drive lists the standard equipment beyond the Coronet 500's: paint stripes, map and courtesy lights, front and rear bucket seats, rear center armrests, a tinted rear window, a tachometer, an oil-pressure gauge and the 318 V8. The brochure offered a three- or four-speed manual or TorqueFlite.³

Under the hood, the new story was the 440. Over-Drive's engine list for the Charger runs from the 318, rated at 230 horsepower and 340 lb-ft, through a two-barrel 383 at 270 horsepower and a four-barrel 383 at 325, to the 440 at 375 horsepower at 4,600 rpm and 480 lb-ft at 3,200, and finally the 426 Street Hemi at 425 horsepower at 5,000 rpm and 490 lb-ft at 4,000. Those are the advertised ratings of the day. The option prices tell the real story: $97 for the four-barrel 383, $133 for the 440 and $712 for the Hemi, more than five times the price of the big wedge.^3,4

Buyers were scarce all the same. Kelly Flory's table puts 1967 Charger production at 15,788, down 57.67 percent from 1966, and the same total appears in Mike Mueller's source book, in Richard Langworth's collectible-car guide and in a 1969 Automotive Industries statistical table. Mueller and Tom Glatch count 14,666 of those cars as domestic. The base price in Flory's table was $3,128. Ate Up With Motor calls the car's two-year run of 53,132 sales an underwhelming debut that accounted for a little less than 5 percent of Dodge's volume.^5,6,7,8,4,1

Within that small total, the big engines were rarer still. Mueller and Glatch give 660 Chargers with the new 440 Magnum, about 4 percent of 15,788. For the Hemi the specialists disagree by one car: Mueller and Glatch count 117, John Gunnell's Standard Guide counts 118, and neither names the record behind its figure. Either way the Street Hemi went into fewer than one Charger in a hundred and thirty. The 440, at $133, found more than five buyers for every Hemi.^4,9

Part of the 440's problem was in the same showroom. Over-Drive describes the Coronet R/T as new for 1967, created to book-end the Charger at the top of Dodge's intermediate line, and it came with the 440 Magnum, dual exhausts, TorqueFlite, Red Streak tires, heavy-duty shocks, torsion bars and brakes, and a scooped hood as standard. John Gunnell's field guide counts 10,181 Coronet R/Ts for 1967, and Clay Fees counts 238 of them with the Hemi. The notchback R/T therefore put more 440s and more Hemis on the road than the fastback Charger did, and on those numbers the notchback, not the fastback, was where Dodge's 1967 big-engine buyers went. The Charger's case rested on its shape, its four buckets and its fold-down rear seats.^3,10,11,4

On the racetrack, the fastback had already shown its limits. Ate Up With Motor recounts that the Charger's sleek roof hid excessive lift that made it hard to control at high speed, and that a last-minute rear-deck spoiler helped keep the tail down without giving it much advantage over notchback rivals. David Pearson drove a Charger to the 1966 NASCAR Grand National championship, but Ford won the manufacturers' title that year. The same history goes on to trace how aerodynamics drove the Charger's next chapters, from the redesigned 1968 body to the Charger 500 and the winged Daytona.¹

The replacement arrived for 1968 with what Stellantis calls all-new styling, meant to create a performance coupe that looked ready to race on Daytona's high banks. The market's reply was immediate. The same Automotive Industries table that records 15,788 Chargers for 1967 records 96,108 for 1968, roughly six times as many. That comparison makes the 1967 car easy to overlook, but it also makes it one of the scarcer Chargers of the muscle era: a carry-over fastback, sold against the new pony cars its own brochure mocked, with a new 440 that only 660 buyers ordered and a Hemi that barely more than a hundred did.^2,8,4