He Spent $136K On A Charger And Now Can’t Get Over $93K After 80 Miles

Limited edition Last Call Hellcat lost over $40k in just 80 miles of driving if you believe auction bids equal market value

                                        https://www.carscoops.com/author/chris-chilton-cc/                                    

There’s always someone left holding the bag when the hype dies down—and in the car world, that bag is often full of questionable financial decisions and rapidly depreciating horsepower.

‘Today’s news is tomorrow’s fish and chip paper’ is an old British saying that comes from the days when fish and chips (fries) came wrapped in old newspaper pages, which were literally old news, and so cheaper for the chippies to buy than plain paper.

More: The Fifth ‘Last Call’ 2023 Dodge Charger Is The King Daytona With 807 HP And Lots Of Orange

I often think of it when I hear of someone getting sucked into paying way over the odds for a car that probably isn’t going to seem anything like as special or as worthy of that lofty price a couple of months later. I suspect the seller of this 2023 Dodge Charger King Daytona knows that feeling all too well.

He bought the car on the Bring a Trailer auction website for a steep $136,000 in 2023 (the model had an MSRP of $100,015) at the height of Last Call mania, but recently failed to sell on the same site when bidding stalled at $93,500.

The seller said he was ‘realistic’ about the fact that the market for some of the Last Call cars isn’t what it was, but simply couldn’t afford to take a bath that deep. He’s done around 80 miles (128 km) in it, meaning if he’d accepted the top bid it would have cost him almost $520 per mile.

Marketing Hyperbole

Dodge did a good marketing job of whipping muscle car fans into a frenzy as the end of Charger and Challenger production neared, reheating its ancient muscle cars by giving them some extra equipment and bespoke graphics. With the exception of the strip-ready Demon 170, few of them offered anything really new, but with production limited to 300 units, the King Daytona had exclusivity on its side so its understandable that some people thought they’d make money on them.

The supercharged 6.2 Hemi in the KD was rated at 807 hp (818 PS), which was a lot, but you could already get the same output by selecting the Jailbreak package with a regular Charger Hellcat Redeye for less cash. Other King Daytona goodies besides those 1960s-style rear-quarter graphics included orange coloring for the Brembo brake calipers and interior stitching to match the compulsory Go Mango orange paint, and 20-inch Satin Carbon “Warp Speed” wheels.

Not Actually The Last Call?

Dodge also warned us that the Last Call cars represented our last chance to buy a V8 muscle car, which it now transpires might not be true. Rumors currently swirling say Dodge will reintroduce the V8 as soon as late 2026, fitting it to the new Charger, which was only designed to take the Stellantis Hurricane inline six conceived as a Hemi replacement.

Those kind of rumors hardly make life easy for anyone hoping to achieve strong money for a car like this King Daytona. The seller’s either got to swallow a big loss and get at least some money back, or be prepared to sit on the car for years until they become truly collectible.

More: Seller Turns Down $64K For Brand New Dodge Durango Hellcat Sitting For 4 Years

He wasn’t the only person to pay well over MSRP for one of these cars, either. In 2023, another King Daytona went for $141,000 on the same site and a third car achieved $148,500 the same year. But in the past 12 months, two examples with lower mileages than this one have sold for $106,000 or less.

Photos BaT