‘General Lee’ Dodge Charger Is More Special Than You Think
Dukes of Hazzard crashed a lot of Dodge Chargers. This is the last surviving Charger R/T show car with a 440 Magnum V8 in it.
TV and movie stars generally lead lives of wealth, luxury, and privilege. TV and movie cars, on the other hand, usually don’t. Many of them get chopped up and modified for certain scenes, dinged, scraped, crunched, and sometimes outright destroyed. The Dukes of Hazzard TV show that ran from 1979 until 1985 is a prime example of how rough on-screen vehicles have it. Dodge Charger after Dodge Charger met a violent demise at the hands of Bo and Luke Duke. But not this one.
Shawn Davis of the YouTube channel AutotopiaLA says, “It’s not a replica, it’s not a recreation, it’s not a clone. No knock against any of those, but this is one of the original 17 surviving General Lees from the TV show.” And it’s the only one left with a 440 Magnum under its hood.
Back when the program was being filmed, the production team could only put a total of $1,600 into the purchase and modification of each car. Chevelles were too pricey, so the staff bought all Chargers wherever they could. This particular Charger did start life as a true R/T 440, but somewhere along the line, its stock V8 got replaced with the 440 from a later model.
According to Davis’s friend Bob Hartwig of Movie Machines, a company that rents out vehicles to be used in film and television productions, “The Dukes of Hazzard” used roughly 320 Chargers during its run. When the series ended in 1985, Hartwig and one of his pals bought the 17 remaining Chargers from Warner Brothers. Hartwig kept this R/T 440 for the next 28 years.
He tells Davis, “We restored this in 2005, when they were doing the [“The Dukes of Hazzard”] movie. The motor was rebuilt, as much as we could keep original, we did. So it’s a faithful representation of how the car looked when the show ended” – right down to its dents and scratches. Hartwig adds, “Even when the exhaust … had to be replaced, we replaced it the same style of what it had.” That meant installing glass-pack mufflers and pipes that dump out right in front of the rear axle.
Hartwig was lucky there was a car left to rebuild in the first place. When the studio jumped the big-block Chargers, the impact from landing often crumpled them into bright orange paperweights. This particular Charger was mainly used for high-speed driving and burnouts in the last three seasons.
And that’s exactly what Davis uses his time in the Duke boys’ car to do. He cooks up big forward and even reverse burnouts on a nearby street. From what we can tell, nobody in a white suit and cowboy hat started looking for him…
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