Hey nineteen–that’s Aretha Franklin / She don’t remember / the Queen of Soul.

When Steely Dan recorded "Hey Nineteen" in 1978, it had been 11 years since Aretha Franklin had hit the No. 1 spot on the pop charts, with 1967’s "Respect." Small wonder that a 19-year-old dinner date wouldn’t remember a singer from her pre-teen years. Yet the Queen Of Soul wasn’t quite done making hits; "Freeway Of Love" made it to No. 3 on the charts in 1985, and her duet with George Michael, "I Knew You Were Waiting For Me," would hit No. 1 two years later. The Billboard charts tend to lean young, with the current average age of a Top 100 performer at an all-time low of 26.8, but there’s no rule to prevent an older artist from sneaking past the velvet rope.

Today’s nineteen-year-olds might not remember Aretha Franklin or Steely Dan, but they likely have no trouble recognizing a Dodge Challenger when they see one; with the exception of a few minor nips and tucks to the nose and tail, it’s looked the same for 12 model years now. The current-day automotive market tends to have little affection for platforms with a decade or more under their belts, but the Challenger is a significant exception to this rule. Its top five years for total unit sales were, in order from fifth to first: 2014, 2018, 2016, 2017, and 2015.

The Chally’s four-door siblings, the Dodge Charger and Chrysler 300, have received more thorough updates since their debuts in 2005 and 2004, respectively, but they are both, shall we say, venerable vehicles. Yet the Charger’s 2018 sales numbers beat its 2011 and 2009 totals, and the 300 moved more units in 2018 than in 2009, 2010, or 2011. When you add up the totals for all three cars, you’ll find out that 178,663 of the big boats from FCA found homes (or spots in airport rental lots) during the last model year.

Dodge

This kind of success flies directly in the face of auto-biz conventional wisdom, which tells us that sedans are dead and big sedans doubly so. The conventional wisdom has nothing to say about big coupes, because the conventional wisdom has long since forgotten that big coupes even exist. I can’t readily recall the last vehicle that occupied the Challenger’s current niche, a 4100-pound, rear-drive, nearly full-sized coupe for everyday-car money—the only candidate that comes to mind is the MN12-generation Ford Thunderbird, which shuffled off this mortal coil in 1997. The average enthusiast on the street will tell you that the Chally is a Camaro/Mustang competitor, but I can disprove that simply by opening the trunk of all three "ponycars" and inviting you to compare the available space. In 2018, the big Dodge is sui generis.

As are the sedan variants, albeit to a slightly lesser degree. Everybody else addresses this dying market niche with taffy-stretched variants of their front-drive family sedans, but save for rental-car category designator, what possible commonality could a Charger R/T Hemi have with an Avalon or Azera? The rest of the industry can clearly see that time has passed the big bruisers from FCA by. Why haven’t the buyers jumped ship? The word has come down from on high: Give up your old-school sedans and make the move to profitable, high-riding, interchangeable crossovers!

Alas, the American buyer doesn’t always get the memo in these situations. Faced with the $39,000 choice between a soap-shaped bird-box with a two-liter four-banger wheezing away under the hood and a sleek V8 sedan with enough visual aggression to cause acid reflux in one’s homeowners’ association, about 115,000 people a year are choosing the latter. God bless them. No doubt a significant percentage of the buyer base has rightfully reckoned that they will have the rest of their lives to buy something like a Honda CR-V, but the Charger and its siblings are already living on borrowed time.

Dodge

It doesn’t hurt that FCA has set the absolute gold standard for listening to its buyers with this platform and its derivatives. Every year the deck of trim levels is shuffled to create something new. These cars are available in actual colors. They have real engine options. You can get basically the same interior with everything from a 292-horse Pentastar V6 to the 392 Hemi. That level of consumer choice disappeared from most vehicles around the time Aretha Franklin scored her last No. 1 hit. Each region of the United States has a different preference in the big Chryslers—where I live, the 392-powered Charger sedan with full aero is common, but when I was in Las Vegas I noticed that the 5.7-liter Challengers are omnipresent.

None of this should be taken to mean that the Charger, Challenger, and 300 are "good cars," because they are not. They are too heavy, too thirsty, too cramped, and too fussy. They are expensive to buy and expensive to insure and some of them can be very expensive to run. I don’t like the paint quality or the relatively ephemeral nature of the cloth upholstery. If you want to get a sense of what could be done with this kind of car using modern engineering, you should check out the Genesis G70. There’s a very big difference between a Charger and a G70, trust me, and other than simple brutish charm, every single advantage goes to the newer car. I wish Ford or GM could find it in their hearts to build a new-generation competitor for the Charger, maybe with a 6.2-liter V8 or a 450-horse EcoBoost six under the hood.

Well, you know what they say about wishes and fishes. The Charger, Challenger and 300 are going to continue enjoying mild success in the market for the simple reason that no other automaker has the courage to build something similar. They’d rather spend money on products like the Volt, which does about a third of Charger sales volume but which sends all the right messages. So what if buyers want an alternative to the Charger? Let 'em eat cake!

With no effective competition, and a customer base that hasn’t tired of the variants available, the only question that remains is: How long can they go? I think that one major refresh, like the one that’s supposedly being planned already, should take the platform along for another half-decade, at least. There’s no reason to call time on it any sooner than that. Add in a few special editions, and keep the price of gasoline reasonable ... hell, the Challenger could go all the way to 2028 and beyond! It could turn 19 itself!

Dodge

In a perfect world, the iconoclasts at FCA would do one more crazy thing before putting these cars out to pasture: build a 300C Hellcat with a six-speed manual. All the parts are already there. It would be a great middle finger to the sustainability crowd, and a great product, and a wonderful gift to the customer base. It would also, not incidentally, be one of the last truly great internal-combustion vehicles to bestride this narrow globe. I’d break the bank to buy one, and so would many of the other 40-something fathers I know. What’s the appropriate Steely Dan lyric for a 707-horsepower, stick-shift Chrysler 300? This one’s easy: "I crawl like a Viper / through these suburban streets." And you know the rest. R-E-S-P-E-C-T, indeed.

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