1968 Dodge Charger: The Coke-Bottle Body and the R/T That Turned a Slow Seller into a Hit

Dodge built 15,788 Chargers for 1967. For 1968 it built 96,108. Those two figures, from Mike Mueller's history of the first car and the Automotive Industries statistical issue for the second, measure a remarkable turnaround. Dodge's own heritage history puts the change as a 343 percent increase in sales over 1967. The corporate percentage and the production figures do not describe the same thing, since sales and model-year production are counted differently, and the production ratio is actually steeper, about six to one. Either way the verdict is the same. A car that had struggled to find buyers for two seasons became, with one redesign and one new performance model, one of the volume cars of Dodge's lineup.^1,2,3

The first Charger's problem was plain arithmetic. Ate Up With Motor counts 53,132 Chargers sold across the 1966 and 1967 model years, a little under 5 percent of Dodge's volume, while Pontiac moved nearly 180,000 GTOs and Ford more than a million Mustangs over the same span. The production tables agree: 37,344 for 1966 and 15,788 for 1967 add up to 53,132, so the site's sales figure matches the production count to the car. The fall from the first year to the second was 58 percent. The 1966-67 car was built on the Coronet chassis with a fastback roof and a four-bucket-seat interior. Flory's figures for the new car make the reset visible: 96,100 Chargers and Charger R/Ts combined, rounded, against a base price of $3,040 for the hardtop. For 1968 the Charger stopped being a specialty fastback and became a sporting hardtop.^4,5,1,6

The shape came from the styling studio rather than the wind tunnel. Ate Up With Motor credits stylist Richard Sias, who had come from General Motors, with the double-diamond profile, and reports that Dodge chief stylist Bill Brownlie initially opposed it before styling vice president Elwood Engel backed the concept. That account is the site's, and it is presented as such. Dodge's heritage history uses the designers' own vocabulary: a double-diamond or Coke-bottle silhouette and a flying-buttress roofline. The finished car added twin scallops on the hood and doors, a recessed grille and round tail lamps, the last of which Dodge would replace with rectangular units a year later. It became the Charger's defining shape, and it would soon cause trouble on the superspeedways.^4,3

The second half of the recipe was the R/T. Ate Up With Motor describes it as the new model that added a standard TorqueFlite automatic and Chrysler's big 440 with 375 gross horsepower, with the 426 Hemi as the costly option above it. Flory lists the R/T hardtop, style XS29, as new for 1968 at $3,506, which is $466 above the $3,040 base Charger (XP29). Its shipping weight of 3,575 lb was 270 lb more than the base car's 3,305 lb. The R/T did not ask its buyer to understand option codes: it put the big engine, the automatic and the badge on one line of the price list, and left the four-speed and the Hemi as the choices above it.^4,6

Buyers took the offer mostly as Dodge wrote it. Mueller's production tables give 17,584 R/Ts, with Gunnell printing 17,582 in passing. Of Mueller's total, 17,109 had the 440, and 14,366 of those came with the standard TorqueFlite against 2,743 with the four-speed, so only about 16 percent of 440 buyers chose to shift for themselves. Set against the industry's 96,108, the R/T figure works out to roughly 18 percent of all 1968 Chargers, though the two numbers come from different compilers and should be read as an approximation. What the sources do not supply is just as telling: no documented count exists for the 318 and 383 base cars that made up the other four-fifths of the year.^5,2

At the top sat the Hemi. Mueller counts 475 Hemi R/Ts for 1968, 211 with the four-speed and 264 with TorqueFlite, which is 2.7 percent of his R/T total. The ratio is worth noticing. Among 440 buyers, fewer than one in six took the manual; among Hemi buyers, 44 percent did. The small group of people willing to pay for Chrysler's racing engine were far more likely to want the clutch pedal that went with it. That is as close as the production tables come to a portrait of the customer. Even so, 264 Hemi buyers chose the automatic, a reminder that the Street Hemi went into road cars that were driven on the street, not only into cars built for the drag strip.⁵

The new Charger also found an audience that never read an order form. Dodge's heritage history notes that 1968 was the year the Charger made its film debut, in Bullitt, starring Steve McQueen, as a black R/T with the 440 Magnum, cast as the getaway car. The film cannot be turned into a sales figure, and its effect on showroom traffic is unmeasured. What it did was fix the shape of the 1968 Charger in the public imagination at exactly the moment the production numbers show Dodge selling it in volume for the first time.³

On the superspeedways the same body was a liability. Ate Up With Motor reports that the recessed grille and the tunnelled rear window between the buttresses produced alarming front-end lift at 180 mph, and counts only five Dodge victories from 49 starts in the 1968 Grand National season. Dodge's heritage account says wind-tunnel testing and research, including rear spoilers and front air dams, gave its engineers an edge in NASCAR. The people who would carry the next chapter were already in place: NASCAR identifies Bobby Isaac as driver of Nord Krauskopf's K&K Insurance Dodges, with Harry Hyde as crew chief, from 1968. The showroom hit and the racing disappointment were the same car.^4,3,7

Dodge's response shaped the next two years. For 1969 it kept the body, split the grille with a centre divider, fitted rectangular tail lamps and added an SE package; it also built the Charger 500, with a flush grille and flush rear window meant solely for NASCAR, and then the winged Charger Daytona. The redesigned car still sold. Industry statistics put 1969 production at 89,199, and Mueller counts 20,057 R/Ts including export cars, against his 17,584 for 1968. The 1968 body would carry the Charger through 1970. It had rescued the nameplate in the showroom, given it a film career, and handed Dodge's racing engineers an aerodynamic problem that produced the most extreme Chargers ever sold.^3,8,5