Dodge Series D8

Among the 160 Dodge entries in the MotorJury library, the Dodge Series D8 holds its own page in a catalogue built to record every car ever made, from series production to one-off concepts. 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

The record does not fix a firm introduction year for the Dodge Series D8, which is itself informative: cars without a clean launch date are usually prototypes, coachbuilt specials, or models whose history was written down long after the fact. The catalogue keeps them anyway, because the odd corners of the record are where the interesting machines hide.

The numbers, read closely

On paper, the Dodge Series D8 reads like this: the record lists its engine as 2793 cc Chrysler flathead engine / D9 Sidevalve engine / sv Straight-six engine / I6 / 3299 cc Chrysler flathead engine / D9/D10 sv I6 / 3568 cc Chrysler flathead engine / D8 sv I6; kerb weight is recorded at 1315 –; the layout is FR layout. 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 Series D8 sits alongside the Dodge 1500, the 1955 Dodge, the 1958 Dodge, the Deora. The record names the Dodge Series D5 as its predecessor and the Dodge Series D11 as its successor, fixing its place in the model line's chronology. Assembly is recorded at Detroit/Hamtramck Assembly / Hamtramck Assembly, Hamtramck, Michigan / Evansville Assembly, Evansville, Indiana / Canada: Windsor Assembly, Windsor, Ontario.

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.

Why concepts and prototypes are in the library

Most car databases stop at series production. This one deliberately does not, because concept cars, racing specials and cancelled prototypes are where the industry thinks out loud — the ideas tested in public years before they reach a showroom. Holding them beside the production cars they inspired makes the lineage legible: nearly every landmark road car in this library has a concept ancestor somewhere in the catalogue, and the connections run through the era links on every page.

Reading a sparse record honestly

Some pages in this library brim with specifications; others, like corners of every archive, are thin. The honest response to a thin record is to say so, not to pad it. What is shown here is exactly what the public record supports today — and because the harvest re-runs nightly, the page you are reading is the fullest version of this car's open record that existed the last time the site was built.

From catalogue to ownership

A specification sheet is only half a car's story. The other half — what breaks, what it costs to keep, which years to avoid — lives in MotorJury's ownership database, computed nightly from federal complaint and recall records and EPA economy data. Where the Dodge Series D8 was sold in the United States, its model years carry full ownership verdicts there.