This ’68 Dodge Charger Is The Ultimate Pro Street Reboot!

Richard Sias sculpted the 1968 Dodge Charger’s iconic shape almost by accident — and then watched another designer take credit for it. Discover how an unofficial clay model became one of muscle car history’s most recognizable silhouettes, and why builds like this reimagined Pro Street Charger keep his uncredited legacy alive.

For Dodge stylist Richard Sias, the 1968 Charger proved to be an amazing contribution to automotive history. A Michigan native who studied at the Art Center College of Design in Pasadena, California, Sias was a young man on a mission when he was given the directive to put body lines to the 1968 rendering of the car by his bosses at Chryslerâ€™s design studio. Despite mis-pronouncements by some higher-level managers, his model prevailed as the one released in late 1967. Ironically, after this amazing project, he would leave Detroit soon after and never designed another OEM combination, eventually going to Boeing for decades where he put his talent on things like airplane equipment.

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Design credit in Detroit was rarely fair, and Richard Sias found that out the hard way. The man who quietly reshaped the entire silhouette of the Dodge Charger did it almost by accident, sculpting his idea into a 1/10-scale clay model between official trim assignments rather than as a sanctioned project. His design would go on to become one of the most recognizable muscle cars ever built — a favorite backdrop for magazine covers and, decades later, the kind of car builders still fight over the rights to reinterpret in Pro Street form, like the reimagined ’68 Charger pictured here. But Sias never got to see how far his design would travel. What actually happened to the man behind one of Detroit’s most iconic body lines?

A Design Born Between Assignments

Richard Sias graduated from the Art Center College of Design in Pasadena in 1963 and landed in Detroit almost immediately, working first for GM before joining Chrysler, where by the mid-1960s he was contributing to Dodge Dart styling. Encouraged by studio manager Charles Mitchell, Sias sculpted his own advanced concept in clay using a double-diamond, “coke-bottle” theme — a shape that, almost by accident, became the basis for the production 1968 Charger. The design was engineered to look aggressive enough to match the 425-horsepower Hemi option Dodge offered that year, and it worked: the redesigned Charger sold roughly 96,000 units in 1968 alone, a massive jump over the outgoing model.

Credit That Came Too Late

Sias stayed at Chrysler only long enough to see his design reach showrooms in late 1967, but he left the company by May 1968 after another designer, Brownlie, began receiving public credit for the Charger’s now-legendary shape. He never worked in automotive design again, moving to Boeing instead, where he spent decades on aerospace projects far removed from the coke-bottle muscle car silhouette he’d created. Builds like the Pro Street ’68 Charger featured here keep his uncredited design alive in the culture — proof that even a body line born from an unofficial side project can outlast the politics that buried its creator’s name.

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