It’s 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?
Oh.
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The Demon, you might remember, debuted for the 2018 model yearand 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 secondhandmarket. Regardless, most were gone quickly—or so we thought.
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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 driven in exchange for, oh, just the $93,000 MSRP.
There are only seven results for new Demons on Autotrader out of the 3,000 that came to the U.S. originally, and two are repeat entries. Two others have stock photos that don’t even show Demons, and one dealership Jalopnik called said the reason it had a listing with a stock photo up was because a Demon is technically in its inventory but being auctioned off for charity. A representative from the East Carolina Dodge dealership confirmed the purple Demon listed on Autotrader is still in their inventory, and that it’s still listed for $149,000.
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But no matter how few, it’s wild to see new, marked-up Demons for sale more than two years afterthis whole saga began. Perhaps it shouldn’t be a surprise given that Dodge didn’t even wait until 2018 was over to introduce a car with horsepower numbers close to the Demon to fill the void it left, with discountsinstead of markups, but it is nonetheless.
Markup season never truly ends, even when we stop paying attention to it. Markup season isn’t a season. It is eternal.
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