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Turn up the volume: Flat out in the Dodge Charger Scat Pack

The 2019 Dodge Charger R/T Scat Pack is a rare breed in the car market. It's a reasonably affordable large sedan with a huge honking V8 and rear wheel drive. You know, the perfect car for this Fourth of July. Or any day ending in Y, really. The R/T Scat Pack is the second most powerful version of the sedan with a 6.4-liter naturally aspirated V8 making 485 horsepower and 475 pound-feet of torque. Only the 707-horsepower Hellcat is a more powerful Charger. But power is only part of the story. The other part is the noise. The V8 has a gritty, dirty rumble to it. We recorded it cruising up on-ramps, down shifting, and got a few standing revs out of it. Check out the video to hear for yourself.

Zombie cars: 9 discontinued vehicles that aren't dead yet

Car models come and go, but as revealed by monthly sales data, once a car is discontinued, it doesn't just disappear instantly. And in the case of some models, vanishing into obscurity can be a slow, tedious process. That's the case with the 12 cars we have here. All of them have been discontinued, but car companies keep racking up "new" sales with them. There are actually more discontinued cars that are still registering new sales than what we decided to include here. We kept this list to the oldest or otherwise most interesting vehicles still being sold as new, including a supercar. We'll run the list in alphabetical order, starting with *drumroll* ... BMW 6 Series: 55 total sales BMW quietly removed the 6 Series from the U.S. market during the 2019 model year. It had been available in three configurations, a hardtop coupe, a convertible and a sleek four-door coupe-like shape.   BMW i8: 18 total sales We've always had a soft spot for the BMW i8, despite the fact that it never quite fit into a particular category. It was sporty, but nowhere near as fast as similarly-priced competitors. It looked very high-tech and boasted a unique carbon fiber chassis design and a plug-in hybrid powertrain, but wasn't really designed for maximum efficiency or maximum performance. Still, the in-betweener was very cool to look at and drive, and 18 buyers took one home over the course of 2021.   Chevy Impala: 750 total sales The Impala represented classic American tastes at a time when American tastes were shifting away from soft-riding sedans with big interior room and trunk space and into higher-riding crossovers. A total of 750 sales were inked last year.   Chrysler 200: 15 total sales The Chrysler 200 was actually a pretty nice sedan, with good looks and decent driving dynamics let down by a lack of roominess, particularly in the back seat. Of course, as we said regarding the Chevy Impala, the number of Americans in the market for sedans is rapidly winding down, and other automakers are following Chrysler's footsteps in canceling their slow-selling four-doors. Even if Chrysler never really found its footing in the ultra-competitive midsize sedan segment, apparently dealerships have a few leftover 2017 200s floating around. And for some reason, 15 buyers decided to sign the dotted line to take one of these aging sedans home last year.

As Dodge Challenger changes, hybrid or however else, it's sure to stay retro

Unverified rumors claim Dodge will make major technical changes to the Charger and the Challenger (pictured) to comply with looming regulations. They'll likely be lighter than they currently are, they could get smaller in nearly every direction, and you can safely bet that they'll incorporate some degree of electrification. The retro-inspired, heritage-laced design is here to stay, however. Mark Trostle, Dodge's horsepower-addicted chief of design, told Muscle Car & Trucks that looks deserve a big chunk of credit for making the Charger and the Challenger as popular as they are. Horsepower and quarter-mile times help sell cars, but it's the "magic of their design" that lures buyers into showrooms to check out the modern-day muscle cars in the metal. "I wouldn't want to ruin something that's been so successful for us," Trostle concluded. He compared the Challenger to the Jeep Wrangler, another design icon in the Fiat-Chrysler Automobiles (FCA) portfolio. The offroader entered its fourth generation in 2018; every part of it is new, and it's not a Xerox copy of its predecessor, but it's still immediately recognizable as a Wrangler. Trostle hinted he's planning this type of evolutionary design for the next-generation Challenger. After all, it's part of the company's history, and heritage is something no amount of money can buy.  While it sounds like development work on the next-generation Challenger is ongoing, Dodge isn't finished with the current-generation car yet. The nameplate will celebrate its 50th birthday during the 2020 model year, and it's reasonable to assume Dodge has something special planned for it.