There are those who don't like muscle cars, who can't understand their appeal and frown at them in confusion and bewilderment. They will not like the new Challenger. And we should pity these people - pity them, but not fear them, because they are spineless and have no soul.

If a car is a dynamic creature, if it's about taking you from where you are to where you need to be and making your hair tingle in the process, then a muscle car is the ultimate expression of that form. A muscle car is about, as the name might suggest, the muscle - it is there because of its engine. Yes, there are lots of other fiddly bits that keep the wheels on the ground, make the windows go up and down and tell people when you're turning left, but the engine is the living, beating heart of the thing.

And in a muscle car, the chassis, the wheels, the wires, electronic gizmos and you, the driver, are there to tend to the engine's needs - to nurture it, nourish it, flatter it and give it all that it demands to go about the business of firing you towards the horizon. Ideally without a big fire. They are about power. And power, in whatever form, has been perhaps the single most alluring thing for human beings since the moment we crawled out of the primaeval ooze and threw a spear at a mammoth.

Cavemen celebrated their power and achievements in cave paintings. These did not generally show them pottering about the place in a neatly pressed loin-cloth tending their herb garden. They showed them running, chasing stuff, killing stuff and mastering their world. We don't paint on caves anymore, we paint on film. And the films that have caught this power thing, that have communicated the muscle-car experience, are the films that have celebrated the muscle car's riot of noise and attitude and let us revel in the dumb-animal, head-down determinedness of the things.

They have not praised the cars' 'faint whiff of comforting lift-off oversteer' or their 'remarkable mid-corner adjustability'. They have set them free to charge across the world roaring at the skies and tearing at the ground. Bullitt's Mustang 390 GT pursued by black Dodge Chargers, the 'Eleanor' Shelby Mustang scaring Nick Cage to death in Gone in Sixty Seconds and, of course, the Challenger being chased by 'Blue Meanies' as it charges towards the horizon in Vanishing Point; the cars are legends.

They are the stuff of fable and myth. They are dragons. When they stalked the world, they stirred our souls, even if we were thinking about them on the way to school in an Austin Allegro.

Those original muscle cars, yes, the American ones, were created with the idea of generating myth and legend from the start. The names: Charger, Firebird, Challenger, Barracuda, Road Runner, all evocative, exciting names, names to pin legends to. They did not speak of efficiency or neatness, they did not whisper of practicality or predictability. They are names to savour, to roll around the tongue and slip into your dreamscapes. And they changed the world. Well, a bit, anyway.

We in the UK struggled to provide direct answers to these simple, powerful American brutes, but we tried nonetheless. The Ford Capri, the Vauxhall Firenza, these were our own, admittedly modest versions of the muscle cars. They lacked the power perhaps, but they brought the style, the passion and the affordability of the muscle car to a British audience.