The Dodge Challenger
The Dodge Challenger was originally a pony car that was offered by Chrysler in order to compete with the Ford Mustang and Chevrolet Camaro. The Challenger has gone into and out of production several times and the name has been attached to a number of different types of cars. The car never sold well but that has actually resulted in it becoming a sought after collector car.
During the 1960's Ford created the pony car when they introduced the Mustang which quickly became very popular. Soon other manufacturers started offering pony cars of their own with Chevrolet's Camaro combining with the Mustang to dominate the market. Chrysler was slow to move into the pony car market because they thought it was a fad that wouldn't last. However by 1970 they decided to offer the Challenger to compete with the Mustang and Camaro. Ironically it turned out that Chrysler had been right about the pony car market being a fad and almost as soon as they started producing the Challenger interest in pony cars started to decline. The result was that the Dodge Challenger was never a particular popular option in that market.
Part of the problem with the Challenger was that they offered a larger and more expensive car than their competitors. In reality the Challenger fell somewhere between a muscle car and a luxury car which hurt its sales since it didn't really target a clearly defined segment of car buyers. Another part of the problem with the Challenger was that it came with so many different options that there was really no standard model. You could get a Challenger with a huge variety of different trim and option packages; you could also get it with almost any engine that Chrysler built under the hood. The original Challenger had a very short lifespan and went out of production in 1974.
The Challenger name was resurrected by Chrysler in 1978 but it was attached to a completely different kind of car. This Challenger was actually a compact car built in Japan by Mitsubishi and sold in America under the Dodge brand. The only thing that this car had in common with the original Challenger was that it was never popular either and was only produced for a short time. In the middle of the current decade there were major redesigns of the Mustang and the Camaro and Dodge have decided to compete with them again. In 2008 they introduced a new Challenger this one much more in keeping with the original. Sales have been decent but the Challenger still trails a long way behind the Mustang and the Camaro.
Despite never being a popular car, or maybe because of it the original Challenger has become a sought after collector car, just like that other Dodge muscle-beast, The Dodge Viper. At least this is true of the early models with the large engines. However because there are not a lot of these cars available even the later models and with smaller engines have value to the collector.