It’s a dealer-markup season again, with the fancy “Launch Edition” of the new “Toyota Supra,” which I hear is less Toyota and more some other manufacturer I cannot recall the name of right now, coming onto the market. But markups are nothing new, and they happen on most vehicles that mean anything to the car community—like the 2018 Dodge Challenger SRT Demon, whose firestorm of markups began way back in 2017 and trickled all the way through 2018.
Wait? What’s that, you say? We shouldn’t talk about markups on new Demons as if they’re a thing of the past, because they’re still going on in the year 2019?
The Demon, you might remember, debuted for the 2018 model year and the 2018 model year only, as a drag-strip nightmare that was also somehow street legal. It’s the epitome of V8, no-care, gas-guzzling American muscle cars in a time when irresponsibly absurd gas-guzzling cars are certainly not the future.
Fiat Chrysler made 3,300 of them, sending 3,000 to the U.S. and another 300 to Canada. Some came with major markups at dealerships, others got them on the secondhand market. Regardless, most were gone quickly—or so we thought.
To be fair, there aren’t many new Demons still in dealer showrooms, their rated 840 horsepower more inactive than a house cat and their extra-wide drag tires sitting on tile floors colder than the hearts of the folks who’d rather get $70,000 in markups than see them drive in exchange for, oh, just the $93,000 MSRP.
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