The New Dodge Charger Cannot Fail Or Stellantis Will Have Another Lost Brand

The new Dodge Charger will be showing up on the internet on Tuesday morning, and it’s a huge deal for Stellantis, which finds itself with far too many brands undergoing identity crises. Dodge is on the verge of becoming one of those brands, which is why there is simply no room for failure of the new Dodge Charger. It has to succeed, because it is the Dodge brand.

You may have read in the news last week that Stellantis killed off the “Wagoneer” brand, and will roll the models into the Jeep lineup. The Detroit News quoted Jeep Brand CEO Antonio Filosa and wrote about why Jeep is giving up on “Wagoneer”:

“We understood that the story about the Wagoneer and Grand Wagoneer was not a very fluent story. So we want to give more fluency to that,” said Filosa, on Friday from the Stellantis U.S. headquarters in Auburn Hills.

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Wagoneer and Grand Wagoneer, which are assembled at Stellantis’ Warren Truck Assembly north of Detroit, were the company’s attempt at a premium and luxury sub-brand. On Friday, Filosa made clear that effort is dead and the two high-end SUVs will be “converging” into the Jeep brand, long considered one of the most valuable names in the automotive industry.

I get what Jeep was trying to do with the Wagoneer brand — basically offer a brand like Land Rover’s upscale “Range Rover” — but that Range Rover brand earned its reputation over decades, and it offered an SUV that was truly novel in its day. It was early to the luxo-SUV craze, and that made it a household name. Was creating a brand based on a 30 year-old name and two body-on-frame SUVs that are not that different than a Cadillac Escalade really going to work for Stellantis? Maybe over time, and with a few more models, it could have gained traction. Maybe.

Regardless, let’s forget about Wagoneer, as there’s more trouble in the Stellantis brand-verse. Look at Chrysler:

The brand offers one car.

Yes, the entire brand consists of a single vehicle  in either gas or plug-in hybrid form. That’s it. Chrysler is the Pacifica.

Now let’s look at Ram’s lineup:

The offerings amount to, basically, just a couple of models. There are some pickup trucks (1500, 1500 Classic, and the heavy duty trucks) and there’s a van.

In my eyes, and in many folks’ eyes, the Ram brand is weak even 15 years after it spun off of Dodge back in 2009. Sure, the trucks still sell in huge numbers, but let’s be honest: Most folks are still calling these Dodge Rams.

That “Ram” is the brand name and the model is just a boring number shared with Chevy — “1500” or “2500” — is so absurdly silly that the general public hasn’t really gotten a grip on the whole naming convention. In fact, I recently saw a car journalist in the secret “Automotive Media Professionals” Facebook group write this post:

Really MotorTrend? Dodge?! It’s been Ram for more than a decade and yes the post they reference is the new 2025 Ram 1500 first drive. They have it right in the title within this newsletter.

This was in reference to Motor Trend’s newsletter, which apparently came out at about the same time as the new Ram 1500 reviews hit the web:

The journalist writing the post on the Facebook page seemed to think that Motor Trend was calling the Ram 1500 a Dodge. This led to a whole discussion among auto media professionals about the Ram brand. Here are a few quotes:

For more than 100 years, the Dodge brand has carried on the spirit of brothers John and Horace Dodge. Their influence continues today as Dodge shifts into high gear with a lineup that delivers unrivaled performance in each of the segments where they compete.

Dodge drives forward as a pure performance brand, offering SRT Hellcat versions of the Dodge Challenger, Dodge Charger and Dodge Durango, as well as an R/T performance hybrid version of the all-new Dodge Hornet, representing the brand’s first-ever electrified performance vehicle. Dodge delivers the drag-strip dominating 807-horsepower Dodge Challenger SRT Super Stock; the 797-horsepower Dodge Charger SRT Redeye, the most powerful and fastest mass-produced sedan in the world; and the 710-horsepower Dodge Durango SRT Hellcat, the most powerful SUV ever; and best-in-class standard performance in the compact utility vehicle segment with the Dodge Hornet. Combined, these four muscle vehicles make Dodge the industry’s most powerful brand, offering more horsepower than any other American brand across its entire lineup.

It has to be the Charger that rightens this listing ship. And the good news is that every indication of what the new Charger will be looks fairly promising. Here’s the Charger Daytona SRT concept car from 2022:

Dodge is in a bit of a pickle. The brand has built its name, in part, on raucously loud, powerful internal combustion engines, and now has to pivot to electric propulsion like the rest of the industry. Many of the brand’s customers are EV skeptics, believing that the only proper engine for a motor car is the V8. I don’t fault them for this; V8s are great. (And, to be fair, many people outside of Dodge’s customer base are are EV skeptics). But getting those skeptics onboard with Dodge’s new EV direction is going to be tricky, and it seems Dodge’s strategy is to acknowledge those customers’ skepticism, commiserate a bit, and then use that commiseration to build trust that gets customers to buy into electrification. At least, that’s what the strategy looks like to me based on this quote from Dodge’s CEO Tim Kuniskis, who showed off the new Daytona concept at the company’s annual drag race-filled event on Detroit’s fabled Woodward Avenue:

““We didn’t ask for the rules to change. We didn’t want them to change, but they did. And we can try to outrun them, but that would be a nine second pass straight into extinction. Or we can do what we did: read their rules. Study their rules. Find their gray areas, then unleash the Banshee. Trust me, this is not the EV they want you to have. This is the way Dodge does EVs.”