The very last 2023 Dodge Challenger rolled off the line only last week, a limited-edition 1,025-horsepower Demon SRT 170. It was a fitting sendoff for a car whose popularity soared on the strength of Hellcat V8s just as it seemed like it might go stale. Production of its two larger corporate siblings, the Chrysler 300 and Dodge Charger, will end this week.
It’s the end of an epoch for parent company Stellantis, as all three of these long-lived cars date back to the long-ago DaimlerChrysler era. They were big sellers for years, even as the car market trended away from big sedans, but they’re not the only very famous names bowing out for 2024.
Every year Forbes Wheels pours one out for the cars that didn’t make it into the next model year, but 2023’s entries are different than those of 2020, 2021 or 2022. As in those years, cars almost always get canceled for economic reasons. If they don’t earn or aren’t worth the cost of designing replacements for, the curtain comes down. As new vehicle buyers continue to drift away from sports cars and sedans, many of them make up 2023’s departing class. Some endings, however, are a little more puzzling.
Stellantis probably could have kept selling Chargers and Challengers for a good while longer. The reason they’re going away is not only their age but also Stellantis’ EV transition, which is also partly responsible for the Jeep Renegade’s departure. Chevrolet’s decision to axe the Bolt EV and EUV is the most perplexing, EV buyers are looking for affordable electrics and the Bolts are more popular than ever, but GM now says the EUV will return in 2025.
The cars on this list aren’t the only ones going away for 2024, but they are the ones that had the biggest impact on consumers and the car market as a whole, and in some cases, we probably won’t ever see cars quite like them again.
Audi TT
The original 1999 Audi TT was a show car come to life in the most literal sense. The sleek, round, racer-like, Bauhaus-inspired shape by Freeman Thomas and J Mays debuted at the 1995 Frankfurt show, followed months later by the open-topped TTS at that year’s Tokyo show. The stunningly clean designs were so well received that Audi put them into production in the fall of 1998. To help get them built quickly and at a reasonable price, the company borrowed liberally from the A3 and its platform-mate, the MkIV Volkswagen Golf.
Though similar to a Golf GTI underneath, the whole was much more than the sum of its parts, and its styling was almost unchanged from the concepts. The TT was luxurious, fun to drive, and wildly distinctive to look at, though a spoiler soon had to be added to the back for aerodynamic stability. The TT and TTS gave Audi’s image an instant boost and quickly found favor with DotCom yuppies and enthusiasts alike. There were even waiting lists to get one.
Audi maintained the basic look of the car when the second generation TT arrived in 2006 and again with the third-gen model in 2014. Both were even faster, but neither had the same market impact as the original. As the market for two-seat sports cars began to dry up after the Great Recession, sales progressively slowed. The TT is still lots of fun and echoes the lines of that nineties original, but Audi has only sold a few hundred of them a year since 2019, and the last one rolled off the line on August 31.
Chevrolet Bolt EV & EUV
Through the end of Q3, Chevrolet had sold 49,494 Bolt EVs and EUVs, up nearly 30% from the entirety of 2022 and more than double the number of Bolts sold in any year before that. But despite that enormous swell of popularity, GM CEO Mary Barra announced in April that both of these diminutive electrics would be discontinued at the end of the year.
Why? Ostensibly to make room for GM’s electric pickups, like the forthcoming Chevrolet Silverado EV. But months later in October, GM announced that the Orion, Michigan assembly plant that makes the bolt would not tool up for the pickups just yet, so the factory will instead be idle for much of 2025. The company says the switch was down to “managing capital,” but it also speaks to how GM’s EV plans seem to be constantly shifting as it struggles to build its new Ultium-platform electrics.
Earlier this month, the company changed its mind again, with Barra announcing that the Bolt EUV will return in 2025 with updated systems. It won’t be a clean-sheet design, but it will use the new Ultium battery tech and drive motors. For now, though, the existing Bolt is at an end.
Chevrolet Camaro
Technically, there is a 2024 model year Camaro, but production has already ended. This isn’t the first time this has happened—the Camaro was canceled in 2002 only to be revived in 2009—but it’s probably the last go around for this car’s historic form. Chevy plans to reuse the name on an electric SUV in 2025, and it might become a sub-brand offering sedans and SUVs. Why Chevrolet would choose this over dusting off its many better-known historic sedan names seems like an obvious question, and neither idea seems likely to please diehard Camaro fans.
Sadly, said diehards have not been buying very many Camaros lately. Sales sank to less than 30,000 cars in 2020 (almost 30% less than in 2002) and haven’t recovered. In 2023, it was a distant third in the muscle car stakes behind the Ford Mustang and Dodge Challenger, and sales of both are also down this decade. This despite the current car being the best-handling factory-issued Camaro ever made, with lots of serious track hardware on the options list, and the most powerful, with an available 650-horsepower V8.
Despite visuals that evoke the previous fifth-generation model and the 1967 original, speed, style, and a chassis tuned for the track weren’t enough to overcome some of this car’s demerits. Few people buy a sports car for a meaningful back seat, but the Camaro’s was especially small even by muscle car standards, and the whole cabin felt confining, plasticky and low-rent. If anything, this Camaro was too uncompromising a performer.
Chrysler 300
Because it’s been around so long, it’s easy to forget how popular the Chrysler 300 was when it first arrived. Although it has been updated quite a bit since, including a major revision in 2011, the first modern Chrysler 300s rolled off the line in January 2004. At the time, it was the first entirely new full-size, rear-drive, traditional sedan from any of the Detroit automakers in a quarter century, and it was impressive indeed.
Its retro-modern styling resembled a budget Bentley crossed with vintage Chrysler cues, and opting for the top-tier 300C, named after the famous 1957 300C, bought you a genuine Hemi V8, with 345 hp. It was altogether faster and cooler than any big Detroit sedan in at least a decade, and Chrysler sold more than half a million of them in the 300’s first three model years. It also spawned a revived Dodge Charger in 2006. The Great Recession blunted its momentum, but the 300 got major updates in 2011 and ever more power in its SRT trims.
The 300 remained a pretty good seller into 2018, but over time Chrylser’s updates became less frequent and the most potent V8 engines were dropped in favor of wilder versions of the Charger. Since 2020, the 300’s sales have been about 1/10th where they were in 2005, and buyers just don’t seem interested in big sedans anymore. The Charger will be reborn in 2025 as an electric vehicle, but the future of the entire Chrysler brand is unknown. For 2024, as the brand turns 100, the only Chrysler-badged vehicle will be the Pacifica minivan.
Dodge Challenger
After making a big splash as a concept at the 2006 Detroit show, the Dodge Challenger stormed back into showrooms in 2008. Its debut was one of the most anticipated of the decade, and enthusiasts immediately liked its retro shape, a direct homage to the 1970 original, one of the meanest old-school muscle cars. The new Challenger kept that tradition alive, complete with a 425-hp Hemi V8, but it launched right into the teeth of the Great Recession. It generated lots of excitement, but fewer sales than anticipated. Fortunately, the best was yet to come.
Sales steadily rose in the mid-2010s, buoyed by a 2015 refresh that swapped the old SRT8 trims for the SRT 392 and SRT Hellcat, the former with 485 hp and the latter a supercharged 6.2-liter monster with 707 hp. The “horsepower wars” of the 1960s have nothing on their modern equivalent, and the Hellcat could rocket to 60 mph in 3.6 seconds and pull a quarter mile in the low 11-second range. 2017 saw the addition of an all-wheel drive (AWD) version of the lower-end Challengers, the first muscle car to offer this feature.
Sales peaked in 2018 as a seemingly endless array of track packages, wide-body kits and Hellcat derivatives came and went from the lineup, with peak power reaching 1,025 hp in the Demon 170, the very last Challenger made. Alas, all good things must come to an end, but it’s been a spectacular run, and far more successful than either of the 1970s-era Challenger designs.
Ford Transit Connect
When the Ford Transit Connect came to the U.S. for the 2010 model year it seemed like it could really change the commercial van market. Small, car-based vans have been ubiquitous in international markets for nearly a century, but American vehicles like this (sometimes called “Sedan deliveries”) died off in the 1960s apart from a few commercial-spec minivans. This left only big, inefficient vans or small hatchback cars for small businesses to choose from.
The Transit Connect, which debuted in Europe in 2002 and was an immediate success there, blended the mechanical bits of a Ford Focus with a big box wagon body, offering enormous space with car-like dynamics and fuel efficiency, even if the most frugal diesel engines were not offered here. Although it never sold in huge numbers, the first Transit Connect, built in Turkey, was successful enough to inspire other companies to create similar products for the U.S., namely the Ram Promaster City (a rebadged Fiat van), Nissan NV and Mercedes-Benz Metris.
That first Connect gave way to the Spanish-built second-generation model in 2014, but by the time of the Covid-19 Pandemic sales of all these vans had begun to trial off considerably, perhaps because of market saturation. One by one, they’ve all been discontinued for the U.S. market, and in March Ford announced that the 2023 model year would be the last to go. Though many such vans, including the Connect, remain popular overseas, in 2024 you won’t be able to buy any of them in the U.S.
Jeep Cherokee
2024 would have been the Jeep Cherokee’s 50th anniversary, but it didn’t quite make it that far. After a steady drop in sales since 2020, Stellantis indefinitely idled the Cherokee’s Illinois factory on February 28. In fairness, the current-generation, circa-2014 Cherokee was badly in need of replacement, with dated engines and systems, but the SUV had sold pretty well until 2020 despite its mediocre gas mileage and still had style and off-road ability going for it. But with internal competition from the cheaper Compass and more rugged Wrangler, Jeep had no replacement on the horizon.
At first, it seemed like Cherokee production might move to the factory where the Compass is built, in Mexico, but that did not happen. Ultimately, the status of the factory itself became a point of contention in the massive UAW strike this fall. Part of the settlement between the UAW and Stellantis is that Belvedere will re-open in 2024 to build the Ram Revolution and possibly the Ram Ramcharger pickups. The Cherokee, however, is all done and unlikely to return for a couple of reasons.
Though massively popular in the 1980s and 1990s as one of the first (and most capable) crossover SUVs, the newer Cherokee never inspired that kind of fandom. But there’s also the name. In 2021, Chuck Hoskin Jr., principal Chief of the Cherokee Nation, asked the automaker to stop using the Cherokee name altogether, a suggestion that CEO Carlos Tavares said he was open to. Though it’s still selling two versions of the Grand Cherokee, the company’s next SUV of roughly this size will be the electric Recon.
Jeep Renegade
From the day Jeep took the wraps off of the Renegade at the 2014 New York auto show it was mobbed with fans. The Tonka-like Jeeplet was both adorable and rugged at the same time, and perfectly timed for America’s bear hug of crossover SUVs in the mid-2010s. It arrived in showrooms in mid-2015 and in its first three years Jeep moved more than 260,000 of them in the U.S., and hundreds of thousands more in Europe and other overseas markets. The Renegade’s strong sales continued through 2019, even though it got mediocre gas mileage for such a small vehicle and had a rather basic interior.
After that though, sales fell off a cliff, and despite deep discounts, Jeep only sold 27,551 of them in 2022 according to Motor Intelligence data, down more than 75% from the model’s 2016 peak. Part of the problem was that many nicer, more modern small SUVs have arrived since 2015, and while Jeep has periodically updated the Renegade, it feels dated and unrefined compared to vehicles like the Hyundai Kona, and it generally cost more than they did, especially if you wanted the off-road capable Trailhawk model.
Nor did it help that the Compass offered a more substantial vehicle for only marginally more money. Jeep did design a Renegade replacement, the Avenger, but decided not to sell that model in the U.S., at least not right now. As Stellantis is converting the Italian factory where the Renegade is made to EVs, both it and its much slower-selling sibling, the Fiat 500X, are dead for 2024.
Kia Rio
When Kia launched the second-generation Rio way back in 2006, many media outlets remarked on how much nicer it was than the original. Yes, it was still a basic economy car, but the Rio5 hatchback looked pretty stylish and seemed better made than its predecessor. It was one of the first times a Kia earned praise for elements beyond its value proposition, offering a taste of what was to come. Since then, Kia has morphed into a maker of stylish, desirable vehicles without abandoning its policy of piling on features at low prices.
Throughout that time the Rio remained one of the nicer small cars on the market, not as engaging as the Honda Fit, but still stylish (especially in hatchback form) and value-packed. The trouble is, the market has also changed. The Fit was discontinued in 2020 after a steady sales decline, and Americans have been eschewing small cars for tiny crossovers en masse since the late 2010s. As nice as the Rio was, after its Hyundai Accent corporate cousin bowed out last year, the writing was on the wall.
In August, Kia announced that the Rio would not return for 2024, and the news was soon followed by Mitsubishi’s decision to axe the tiny Mirage for 2025. Nissan is rumored to be killing the Versa that year as well. If that happens, it’ll leave the U.S. small car field entirely to Mini.
Kia Stinger
It should have been a winner. From the reaction of enthusiasts and auto show crowds when the Kia Stinger was previewed in concept form, and when it arrived at showrooms in 2018, it seemed like the Korean brand was poised for success with this car. On its merits, it had all the right ingredients. It was roomy, fun to drive and offered an experience not unlike the Audi A7 but at a much lower price.
Unlike the Audi it was even rear-wheel drive, and it drew just as much critical praise as its platform-mate, the Genesis G70. True, Kia did not offer a manual transmission, but the recipe was really, really good. Unfortunately, the Stinger arrived just as Americans were losing interest in sedans, and though much cheaper than an Audi, it was still pretty pricey for a four-door Kia. Brand kudos matter to new car buyers, and the Stinger started $4,000 above the priciest version of the automaker’s K5 sedan this year. The hottest versions were well over $50,000.
While Stinger sales have been stagnant, peaking at 16,806 cars in 2018 and falling to 7,809 in 2022, Kia has dropped hit after hit in the SUV world. The Telluride, Sorento, Sportage and others are all huge sellers. You can’t blame Kia for going where the buyers are, even if it means dropping an enthusiast gem like the Stinger. Buyers can still get a taste though, as the G70 will get a modest refresh for 2024 and continue on.