Dodge Dakota

The Dodge Dakota is one of 160 Dodge models in the MotorJury library, the catalogue that sets out to hold every car ever made — production, prototype and concept alike. The record places its introduction in 1986. The photography on this page is hotlinked from Wikimedia Commons under an open licence, with the photographer credited on every frame.

The era it was born into

To read the Dodge Dakota properly it helps to place it in its decade. The 1980s were the decade of turbocharging, electronic fuel injection and the first mass digital engine management — Group B rallying and hot hatches defined its performance culture. Any car launched into that world was shaped by it — by what materials, engineering and regulation allowed, and by what buyers of the day demanded. Its direct contemporaries in this catalogue, introduced within three years of it, include the Jeep Jeep Wrangler, the Ferrari Ferrari F40, the Ferrari Ferrari Testarossa — the cars a buyer of the period would actually have cross-shopped.

The numbers, read closely

On paper, the Dodge Dakota reads like this: the record lists its engine as 135 cuin K I4 / 152 cuin K I4 / 150 cuin AMC I4 / 239 cuin LA/Magnum V6 / 318 cuin LA/Magnum V8; kerb weight is recorded at height = 1987–1990: 64.2 in/67.1 in / 1989–1993 Club Cab: 64.7 in / 1991–93 Club Cab 4WD: 67.7 in / 1994–96 4WD: 67.3 in / 1994–96 Club Cab 4WD: 68.5 in / 1994–96 2WD: 65.0 in / 19; drive goes through 3-speed A998 automatic / 4-speed A500 automatic / 5-speed manual; the layout is Front-engine, rear-wheel-drive layout / Front-engine, rear-wheel-drive / Front-engine, four-wheel-drive layout / Front-engine, four-wheel-drive. Every figure above is a manufacturer specification carried by the Wikipedia infobox or the open Wikidata record for this model — nothing on this page is estimated, and where a source is silent the row simply does not appear.

Its place in the Dodge story

Within Dodge's own catalogue the Dodge Dakota sits alongside the Dodge 1500, the 1955 Dodge, the 1958 Dodge, the Deora. The record names the Dodge Ram 50 as its predecessor, anchoring one end of its lineage. Assembly is recorded at United States: Warren, Michigan (Warren Truck Assembly) / Brazil: Campo Largo, Paraná (1998–2001).

How this catalogue works

This library is generated, verified and rebuilt from the open record on every deploy. The catalogue skeleton comes from Wikidata, specifications from Wikipedia's infoboxes under CC BY-SA, photography from Wikimedia Commons under each file's own licence, and the ownership data from United States federal safety records. Nothing is written by hand and nothing is invented: every fact on this page traces to a public source, and every page is rebuilt nightly as those sources improve. Errors in the source record will appear here too — and disappear the night the source is corrected.

From catalogue to ownership

What this page cannot yet tell you is what the Dodge Dakota costs to live with — that is a different dataset. MotorJury's ownership verdicts are computed from federal complaint and recall records plus EPA economy data, published per model year as the nightly ingest reaches each car. If this model was sold in the United States, its years will surface in the ownership database; browse it live or price any car yourself with the true-cost calculator.