Dodge’s boxy affordable midsize sedan featured a refrigerated glove box to keep beverages cold for road trips, but that was never enough for it to mount a serious challenge to the Toyota Camry’s dominance during the Obama administration. Almost a decade after Dodge canceled the car, though, at least one sold brand new.
The Avenger is an extreme case, but it’s hardly the only zombie car sold in the first quarter of 2022. With a worldwide shortage of microchips limiting the number of new cars on dealer lots, more than a handful of buyers drove off in the oldest thing on the dealership lot in the first three months of this year.
Zombie cars are rare. Dealerships don’t own the cars on their lots. They’re often making payments on them through a complex loan arrangement with the automaker that built them. The longer they hold onto them, the more payments they have to make. Selling a car quickly makes the dealer more money than keeping one around as it ages.
If a dealership stores a car for years, they have to pay to keep it maintained as well. What dealerships call “holding costs” rack up in a vehicle once technicians are replacing the fluids to keep it functional.
Automakers tend to stop advertising cars when they first consider discontinuing them. Shoppers usually walk into a dealership knowing what they want to see, and it’s usually something they’ve seen advertised recently. Few imagine themselves driving off in a brand new, 5-year-old car.
That leaves dealerships motivated to get rid of aging stock and replace it with something currently advertised.
But, from time to time, a dealership is left with an unsold car on a storage lot years after its time. With cars in short supply this year, some of those zombie cars are selling. We dug into our first-quarter sales data and found a few undead surprises that, somehow, found a new buyer in the first three months of this year:
This may be the least surprising entry on the list. The quirky little BMW i3 electric car was just discontinued last year. But it may be the most un-Bimmer-like BMW ever built, with urban runabout manners and none of the sport sedan feel Munich’s finest cars are famous for.
A few years ago Italy’s Fiat looked at the beloved little open-top Mazda MX-5 Miata and thought, “We should have built that.” It had the classic tiny, chassis-first engineering that was the magic behind Europe’s beloved roadsters. All it needed was some Italian design flair to make a convincing Fiat. So they negotiated a deal with Mazda and began building Miatas with slightly different bodywork for sale under the name Fiat 124 Spyder. The “Fiata” was made from the 2017 to 2020 model years. But sales, apparently, are still happening.
The BMW i8 remains a unique accomplishment more than two years after the last one rolled off the production line. A hybrid supercar, it boasted 0-60 mph times around 4 seconds and an EPA rating of 76 MPGe. We still think, from behind, it looks like it’s giving birth to a Porsche. But no one can deny its appeal. At least one shopper agreed this year, buying one two years after production stopped.
Unlike the other cars on this list, the Buick Regal is still built and sold today. In China. GM announced that it would leave American showrooms in 2019, but at least one stuck around until this year.
Cadillac was once world-famous for its immense, opulent full-size sedans. The largest Cadillac sedan today wouldn’t measure up to them, though. The last car to try was the CT6, discontinued in 2020. The factory that once built these today churns out GMC Hummer EVs.
The Impala name has a long history, but it hasn’t been used since 2020. The last Impala was a V6-powered front-wheel-drive sedan that probably didn’t live up to the legend of the rear-wheel-drive Impalas of the 1960s. But it was still a comfortable family car, and it’s still making the occasional appearance on sales charts.
Built from 1994 to 2014, the Avenger was Dodge’s last attempt at building a mainstream midsize sedan. Today, Dodge sells the big Charger and doesn’t bother trying to market something smaller. But, incredibly, one dealership sold an Avenger brand new this year, eight years after its production run ended.
The compact Dart lasted a little longer than the Avenger on Dodge lots, disappearing in 2016. A compact sedan based on a Fiat design, it never enjoyed the success of the Neon it replaced, probably because the Dart looked generic where the Neon looked like a friend. At least one buyer, though, drove off in a never-before-sold Dart in 2022, six years after Dodge wrote it off.
