20 years of Dodge muscle comes to an end in Brampton, Ont.

An eight-year run for the boxy sedan with undersized windows and an unmistakable oversized grille would have been enough for Stellantis designer Ralph Gilles to call the Chrysler 300 a success. Yet nearly 20 years after workers at Brampton Assembly Plant built the first 300 in early 2004, production of the car continues to hum along northwest of Toronto, even if it’s more a trickle than a flood.

“It has exceeded all of our expectations,” and to this day, the “performance numbers it puts down are fantastic,” said Gilles, chief design officer at Stellantis, who was instrumental in bringing the 300 to life. “There were a lot of battles behind the car [for] a lot of our era. The company’s transitioned, yet it’s a constant,” he told Automotive News Canada.

Gilles was raised in Montreal and holds Canadian and U.S. citizenships. The century-old American brand was part of Daimler-Chrysler when the 300 was introduced for the 2005 model year. The company has gone through four ownership changes since, while the 300 has shifted into only its second generation.

While production of the sedan peaked in 2005 at nearly 200,000, the 300 has remained a staple of Chrysler’s sparse lineup, even with just 12,000 sales through September of this year.

The illustrious run will come to an end Dec. 22, as Brampton bids farewell to the 300 as well as the Dodge Charger and Challenger, which have kept a work force of close to 2,500 people busy for the better part of two decades.

The Dodge Charger followed the 300 into production in 2005, with the Dodge Challenger not far behind in 2008.

There has been little letup since.

“Our members have worked six days a week for a long period of time,” said Vito Beato, president of Unifor Local 1285, which represents the hourly workers.

The three vehicles have translated into years of steady hours for membership as well as healthy profits for the company, Beato said.

“Usually when you go long in the tooth with products, the sales tend to decrease,” he said. But with the Brampton vehicles, “the sales have gotten better and better over the years,” particularly when it comes to the Charger and Challenger.

The muscle-car programs are near and dear to members, said Beato, who anticipates an emotional end to production Dec. 22.

“These are like our babies, these products, and we very much take pride in that,” he said.

Watching visitors to the plant react to the roar of the V-8-powered cars running through testing during the final stages of assembly always drives home the uniqueness of the programs, Beato said.

“Even though we see it every day, we still get a kick out of it, too, when we hear those cars coming off the end of the line.”

REAR DRIVE, FORWARD THINKING

It all started with the introduction of Chrysler’s new rear-wheel-drive platform, which premiered with the 300 and shorter-lived Dodge Magnum station wagon that was also built in Brampton.

“Some people in the company saw the rear-drive as retro, as almost going backward in technology,” Gilles said. “But we found out very quickly with the Hemi powertrains, front drive was not able to manage over 300 horsepower.”

The design team had plans to push performance well past that barrier, making rear-wheel drive a “no-brainer,” he said. And it didn’t hurt that doing burnouts and drifting “looks better on a rear-drive car.”

“That was actually part of the subconscious, I think. We were thinking about making a true muscle car.”

At the time, Gilles was director of the company’s large-car studio and family vehicles.

But before Gilles and the design team could get there, he had to fight to get the boxy out-of-the-box Chrysler 300 to market.

Gilles took a shine to early sketches of the vehicle, helped to refine them and pushed to have the design put to the test with consumers. Despite initial resistance from skeptical superiors, the reception to the vehicle at clinics showed that the designers had something special.

“The reactions were very different,” Gilles said. “It was not just talking about the style of vehicle, but it was emotive. People were talking about memories and positive things and Americana and everything but the car, actually.

“It just stimulated a lot of thoughts and conversation, and then on top of that, it reignited a discussion about Chrysler that we hadn’t heard in a long time.”

The 300 was heaped with critical acclaim at launch, and customers in Canada and the United States snapped up nearly 150,000 in its first year of production and close to 500,000 over three years.

CHARGER MUSCLES IN

This cleared the way for the third RWD model. The Dodge Charger, which bridged the gap between the Dodge muscle cars of old and humdrum family sedans, made its public debut in Detroit at the start of 2005.

In its entire history, the Charger had never been a four-door, so a sedan wearing a Charger badge was “not obvious but it was the right call,” Gilles said. “Being a four-door has really given the Charger a lot more take-up than we would have ever thought on it.”

Underpinned by the same LX platform as the 300 and Magnum, production began in Brampton in the spring of 2005 for the 2006 model year. The mass-market appeal propelled annual Charger production past that of the 300 by 2007. And as the assembly lines come to a halt this year, workers in Brampton will have built nearly two million Chargers.

As with the other models based on the LX platform — succeeded by the improved LD platform in 2011 — the Charger was offered in RWD throughout its run, with all-wheel-drive variants also available.

And while the jury’s still out on whether a base four-door Charger with a V-6 can be considered a true muscle car, the two-door Challenger, introduced for the 2008 model year, leaves no room for such debate.

The design team had been gunning to add it from the outset, Gilles said, and the Challenger concept teased in 2006 set the race to refine a design that would be ready to build in early 2008. With just 22 months elapsing between the official go-ahead and production, the Challenger remains one of the “fastest-to-production cars ever,” he said.

The arrival of the Challenger did have one casualty. It marked the end of the line for the Magnum. That vital assembly space was reallocated to the coupe.

The Charger, Challenger and 300 lineup has been constant over the years, but the vehicles — the Challenger in particular — have continued to evolve.

AGING BUT ALWAYS FRESH

“It’s just a fun canvas to play with,” Gilles said. “I can’t tell you how many hoods we’ve done for that vehicle, and fascia and wheels and all kinds of derivative models in terms of buzz models that have caught on and really have their own subculture that supports them.”

The Challenger started off in 2008 with a 425-horsepower 6.1-litre Hemi V-8, and in 2023 it topped out at 1,025 horsepower in the SRT Demon 170.

And while the exteriors are still recognizable, the technology and interiors have evolved dramatically, Gilles said. The Charger was one of the first vehicles to include a touchscreen infotainment system, for instance, while designers have upgraded materials inside to reflect the premium nature of certain variants.

Ultimately, it’s a “study in life-cycle management,” Gilles said. “We really did never let the car [die]. As a matter of fact, the sales prove it. The Challenger in particular has never really decayed in sales; [it] has been steady for a long time.

“Even through the downturns in the economy, the Challenger has actually sustained great sales, so it seems to be a reward vehicle for people but also an elixir at the same time.”

The muscle cars, as well as the Hemi V-8, will bid farewell to Brampton, but the programs won’t be going far.

Stellantis has yet to officially assign specific nameplates but has said the next-generation Dodge muscle cars will be built at the Windsor Assembly Plant, about 350 kilometres away.

MUSCLE FOR THE FUTURE

A “very dedicated team of engineers are working on” transitioning them to the EV era “as we speak,” Gilles said.

The Dodge Charger Daytona SRT Banshee concept, introduced in 2022, is a “good bellwether” for where the team is headed, he said. And that goes for the two-door design as well.

Unlike the four-door version produced at Brampton, Gilles hinted that the market should count on a two-door model throwing back to the original Charger of the late 1960s and early ’70s.

“That is a big grand experiment,” he said. “For me it’s a bit of a correction to say you’ve been asking for this car for 40 years now, so let’s see what happens.”

A replacement for the Challenger has not been mentioned and a successor to the 300, meantime, will likely be spiritual.

Gilles provided no details about what Chrysler plans to roll out, but said a new vehicle is on deck.

“I don’t think people are going to say it’s a new 300 per se, but they will say it’s a fantastic new Chrysler,” he said.

After nearly 20 years of the 300, Charger and Challenger, the Brampton plant will be down for up to two years for retooling.

WHAT’S NEXT FOR BRAMPTON?

In the spring of 2022, Stellantis pledged to transition the plant to build electrified vehicles, ending months of uncertainty about Brampton as production of the three cars comes to an end.

“That put ease in our members because we didn’t know what was going on, and now, we have a clear path,” said Unifor’s Beato.

The two-year timeline will be a long haul for members, he said. But given the rapid progress of some other recent EV retooling projects — namely the short turnaround of General Motors’ CAMI Assembly Plant in Ingersoll, Ont. — the union is optimistic that Stellantis will be able to reduce the downtime.

The Brampton plant is slated to build the new Jeep Compass crossover in both gasoline and battery-electric variants when it reopens in late 2025. Among other improvements, the plant will have a new paint shop, tandem stamping lines and new body-in-white and underbody spaces, Beato said.

Members have logged some “historic memories” over the past 20 years, he said. But with plenty of fans of the Jeep brand on the line, excitement is building for the new era.

“This new retool and transition for our plant into the EV future will support our members and their families for generations to come as well.”