Stellantis sold 3,446 gasoline-powered Dodge Chargers in the U.S. from July through September, and the third-quarter sales chart it posted Oct. 1 prints a 1,348% increase beside that number. The comparison quarter had 238 gas Chargers in it. None of those 238 had the twin-turbo SIXPACK engine, because Dodge hadn't started building one yet.The new gas Charger is gaining ground every quarter, and that part of the story is good news for Dodge. Counted as a whole nameplate, though, the Charger is selling at roughly a fifth of the pace the old car managed in its final full year, and the electric Charger Daytona has nearly disappeared from the sales chart. Dodge today is a Durango company that also sells a few thousand Chargers a quarter.What Stellantis reported for the third quarterThe chart splits the Charger into two lines. "Charger ICE" went from 238 sales in the third quarter of 2025 to 3,446 this year. "Charger BEV," the electric Daytona, went the other way, from 2,776 to 233, a 92% drop. Year to date, the gas car stands at 8,029 sales and the electric car at 767.The written release that went out with the chart doesn't mention the 1,348% figure. Its Dodge bullet points say brand sales rose 2%, Charger retail sales rose 22%, and the Durango had its best third quarter since 2005. Stellantis sold 324,277 vehicles in the U.S. in the quarter, about flat with the 324,825 it sold a year earlier.Pulling the gas car's quarterly results out of Stellantis's charts shows a steady climb. The first-quarter chart lists 1,672 gas Chargers. Subtracting the first and third quarters from the year-to-date total leaves 2,911 for the second quarter. Then came 3,446. That is The Auto Wire's arithmetic, not a figure Stellantis published, and it works out to an 18% gain from spring to summer.Where the 238 cars came fromDodge said in August 2022 that the 2023 model year would close out the Charger and Challenger "in their current form." The two-door SIXPACK Charger Scat Pack didn't start production at Windsor Assembly in Ontario until Dec. 2, 2025, with the R/T and four-door versions following in the first quarter of 2026.So a gas Charger sold in the summer of 2025 had to be an old-generation car that had been sitting in inventory. Stellantis's sales methodology explains how that works: most reported sales are retail deliveries that dealers record from their own stock, counted when the dealer reports the sale, not when the factory builds the car. A car assembled in Brampton in 2023 counts as a 2025 sale if it leaves the lot in 2025. Stellantis's full-year 2025 chart shows 2,141 gas Chargers and 1,800 Challengers sold that way in a year when neither car was being built until SIXPACK production started in December. The Brampton plant that built them may now go to an armored-truck maker.That is the whole mechanism behind the 1,348%: a full quarter of new-car production measured against a few hundred old cars clearing out of inventory.The electric Charger Daytona sold 233 units in the U.S. in the third quarter, down from 2,776 a year earlier. Image via StellantisThe Charger counted as one carAdd the two Charger lines together and the third quarter comes to 3,679 cars, up from 3,014 a year ago. That is a 22% gain in total sales; the release cites the same percentage for retail sales alone. Through nine months, the combined count is 8,796, compared with 8,943 in the first nine months of 2025. With a gas engine on sale all year, Dodge has sold about 150 fewer Chargers than it did in 2025, when the electric car carried most of the volume.So far the gas car has mostly replaced electric sales. Charger Daytona sales have been stuck between 233 and 346 a quarter since the end of 2025. That decline began alongside a federal policy change: the IRS says the new clean vehicle credit is not available for vehicles acquired after Sept. 30, 2025. Stellantis hasn't said how much of the Daytona's slide it blames on that, and the chart can't answer the question.Price explains part of the shift. Dodge's Charger FAQ lists the 2026 R/T at $49,995, the gas Scat Pack at $54,995 and the electric Daytona Scat Pack at $59,995. A shopper who wants 500-plus horsepower and all-wheel drive saves $5,000 by choosing gasoline, and the gas car also comes in a $49,995 R/T version with no electric equivalent on that list.How the numbers compare with the last Hemi yearStellantis's 2023 sales chart shows 75,920 Chargers and 44,960 Challengers sold in the U.S. that year, a combined 120,880. The Charger alone averaged almost 19,000 a quarter. This summer's 3,679 is about 19% of that pace, and there is no Challenger to add to it.That changes what kind of company Dodge is. In 2023 the Durango accounted for 69,196 of the brand's 199,458 sales, about 35%. In the third quarter of 2026 it was 22,755 of 26,546, about 86%. The Hornet, the small crossover Dodge added in 2023, sold 85 units in the quarter. Without the Durango's 14% gain, Dodge's 2% increase would have been a decline, and the brand is still down 3% for the year.The Durango made up about 86% of Dodge's U.S. sales in the third quarter. Image via StellantisThe volume matters to dealers, who now have one Dodge car to sell instead of two, at a small fraction of the old rate. Stellantis said in December 2025 that Windsor Assembly would add a third shift and up to 1,500 jobs in early 2026 to build the Charger lineup and Chrysler's minivans, so the plant's workload depends on the minivans as much as on the muscle car. Chrysler brand sales rose 6% in the quarter.What the six-cylinder engine changes for ownersThe Hurricane-based SIXPACK is a 3.0-liter twin-turbo inline-six, built in a standard-output version with 420 horsepower and 468 lb.-ft. of torque for the R/T and a high-output version with 550 horsepower and 531 lb.-ft. for the Scat Pack. Every 2026 Charger has all-wheel drive. In Dodge's own comparison table, the last Hemi-powered Charger Super Bee made 76 horsepower per liter of displacement and the SIXPACK Scat Pack makes 183. The engine gets that density from turbocharger boost, and the sound changes with it, which is why a $3,359 aftermarket exhaust can't make the car sound like a V8.Boost also makes heat the limiting factor. Dodge's August release for the 600-horsepower 2027 Charger Super Bee Launch Edition spends as much space on cooling as on power. To get 50 more horsepower than the Scat Pack, engineers fitted larger 56 mm Garrett turbos running more than 30 psi, then added auxiliary radiators, raised the high-temperature cooling circuit's capacity by more than 50% and more than doubled the low-temperature circuit's capacity. The Super Bee also adds a "Race Prep" feature that keeps the electric cooling fan running after shutdown. In every SIXPACK car, turbochargers and the hardware that cools them do the work the Hemi did with displacement, and those are the parts owners will live with as the cars age. The Super Bee's spec sheet calls for premium fuel.Dodge revealed the Super Bee at Roadkill Nights as part of the Charger's 60th anniversary. It is a limited-production gas car built at Windsor, and Dodge has promised pricing and ordering details "later this year."What to watch in the fourth-quarter reportStellantis's next quarterly chart, due in early January, will compare against 273 gas Chargers and 346 Daytonas from the end of 2025, so expect another four-digit percentage for the gas car. The full-year comparison is nearly settled already: Dodge sold 9,562 Chargers of both types in 2025, and 2026 needs only 766 more in the fourth quarter to pass that. If the fourth quarter matches the third, the 2026 total will be about 12,500, roughly a tenth of what the Charger and Challenger sold together in 2023.The figure that will say more is the gas Charger's own quarterly number. It rose from 1,672 to 2,911 to 3,446 this year. A fourth-quarter result well above 3,446 would mean the R/T and four-door versions are still finding new buyers; a flat or lower number would suggest the early demand has been met. The Super Bee's price, when Dodge announces it, will show whether the company is chasing volume or margin with the gas car.Is a 3,446-car quarter the start of a real comeback for the Charger, or is that roughly what demand for a six-cylinder muscle car looks like?⚡ Read the full article on The Auto Wire
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