The Dodge Dart has been dead since 2016 and the Chrysler 200 since 2017.
But Stellantis dealerships managed to find first owners for four Darts and two 200s in 2022.
They’re among six examples found by Kelley Blue Book of what it called “zombie cars” — nameplates that had been killed by automakers but came back to life in last year’s new-vehicle sales results.
For whatever reason — inventory shortages, soaring vehicle prices or perhaps the same thinking that makes people still buy flip phones — those buyers took home vehicles that former Fiat Chrysler Automobiles CEO Sergio Marchionne had happily buried.
“The Chrysler 200 and the Dodge Dart, as great products as they were,” Marchionne said before his 2018 death, “were the least financially rewarding enterprises that we’ve carried out inside FCA in the last eight years.”
Dodge had two other dead nameplates rise up — the Journey, discontinued in 2020, logged 194 sales, and the Viper, last made in 2017, notched one.
Volkswagen sold two CCs, despite having not made the coupe-style sedan since 2017.
The most glaring oddity KBB discovered in the reams of transaction data gathered by parent Cox Automotive was a never-before-titled Suzuki XL7. Not only did the three-row utility go out of production in 2009, but the automaker abandoned the U.S. market entirely a few years later.