Dodge will discontinue its Challenger and Charger muscle cars next year
cnbc.com
cnbc.com
Comparing the smooth, precise acceleration of a Tesla Plaid with its premium advanced technology to the visceral emotions that a 700HP gas-powered beast drums up is just not the same. You can feel the sound and vibration of a monster supercharged engine screaming as it violently pitches you forward.
It's the same reason why people buy Harleys instead of advanced Japanese superbikes, and it's the same reason why Harley sued Honda for copying their archaic engine design so that it would have the same vibration and sound (https://www.thedrive.com/article/11345/remember-when-harley-...).
This CEO is making a big mistake by completely eliminating them instead of just reducing their production numbers. It seems to be more of a political move than a smart business decision; just because he doesn't like that surge of emotion and raw fury emanating from a big-block V8 doesn't mean that others won't pony up big bucks to get it.
If you take your old stick shift gas car out for a 100 mile drive once a month, who cares.
You'll have plenty of cars to pick from when EVs start ushering out the old dirtburners into obsolescence. Hopefully the EV drivetrain gets so cheap that it becomes a tsunami.
It's not like EVs won't be fun to drive with low center of gravity skateboards and hyperfast acceleration. I would guess that after a few decades of driving EVs, the ICEs and their gear shifts and smell will quickly lose their charm with practically everyone.
I hope that with a really cheap and compact EV motor+battery, classic cars get massively retrofitted to be electic. You already see it in some auction cars. An electric motor is not that big. If/when a good compact solid state battery is mass produced, then you can probably cobbly a kit for the standard engine mounts that has the electric motor + batteries in one engine block replacement kit.
They can pipe in simulated engine block sound.
I will so miss stick shift however.
As an aside, electric restomods are the height of gauchery. Like having a Patek Phillipe case with a Timex digital face.
Your requirements are fotlr rural americans
Mazda Miata is my crazy bet for both, but what do I know.
I test drove both the 6 spd auto and the 6 spd manual. The manual was alright but the auto was way more livable in stop-and-go city traffic, especially for someone like myself with a messed up ankle. Better fuel economy, quieter on the highway, same acceleration, and if I want to mix things up on a curvy mountain road, I can pick gears with the flick of a paddle shifter.
Go for the stick if you want, but don't hate on people who choose different.
Fun fact: The head of design of Tesla left Mazda after years of trying to get a serious EV initiative going. He complained that it was always going to be a side project over there so he gave up.
Vehicles are interesting in that for the people that enjoy them there's a tendency towards brand loyalty in ways that don't exist for other products. This is especially true with the older generations. There are/have been web series, magazines, books, TV shows dedicated to Mopar, Ford, and GM. I can think of 5 "Ford guys" in my life without even trying. While that brand loyalty has waned a lot over the past couple of decades it still exists, and Dodge will most likely bring back a version of these to satisfy that base.
OEMs will realize this a decade from now when the old people loyal to the big three start to die off, the people who don't care start buying the Chinese EVs, and the remainder stay loyal to Tesla.
I like to think that people want to be shelling out $ for S2000s (great car, very inefficient in no small part because its design parameters are a function of Japanese efficiency requirements that centered on engine displacement), but that may be my bias.
The Challenger and Charger are terrible in terms of fuel efficiency but safer to people as drivers can see more of what's in front of them:
>Researchers at the Insurance Institute for Highway Safety (IIHS) analyzed the details of 14,000 fatal pedestrian crashes, and they found that SUVs were twice as likely as cars to be making a left turn when the crash happened.
https://www.consumerreports.org/car-safety/suv-and-pickup-tr...
But for some reason we don't care about car crashes and people getting run over and we keep designing highways and roads specifically to accelerate vehicles next to regular people and slower moving modes of transit and we keep locking people in their homes unless they drive 70 mph with near-instant acceleration to go half a mile to the grocery store to get a loaf of bread.
Visibility is an issue, but it's always been an issue (camaro, I'm looking at you!). We need better sensors to help protect people. We also need separated bike lanes and safer pedestrian infrastructure.
The cars have never been the issue here, it's the single minded focus on car centric infrastructure that's killing people.
You will because we're putting supercars into the hands of people who simply cannot handle them and we obscure their line of sight and we design roads and highways for speed and to not have to pay attention to anything except the car in front of you also moving at a high rate of speed.
Also let's call this what it is, which is an increase in people being ran over, and cars crashing into each other and disfiguring people for life for no good reason. Calling it an "accident" like spilling milk instead of running over someone and their intestines spilling into the street really downplays how serious of a problem car crashes and running over people is.
It's the driver. It's not the vehicle. Some of us have driven large trucks our entire lives without incident. You put a small person in a large Tahoe and there's an exponential decrease in visibility, coupled with never having driven such a large vehicle before and you get some bad statistics.
For proof go to any grocery store during peak hours and you're very likely to see two large vehicles side by side where one is parked nicely between the lines and the other is hanging over.
One road I frequent is used by large commercial trucks (dump trucks). These guys are professional, and move way over giving me a LOT of space. oddly enough, the pickup drivers watch the dump trucks do this, and yet refuse to move over even slightly?
i'm not sure what it is about people in pickups, but they need to do a better job educating the drivers as well.
Like seriously, if you watched a dump truck move, why were you unable to do this as well?
it isn't just about "visibility" but there seems to be some attitude problems around pickup truck drivers.
If you see a pickup with some company logo, 90% chance they will be decent and give you space. You see someone in their "pavement princess" all washed and polished, no F'ing way they will move over.
What's more is that most of the trucks that act in this way have dealership license plate frames or stickers from the outlying rural communities, so they're coming into the community where I live and endangering my safety out of what I assume is some misguided hatred of environmentally friendly transportation.
My dad was in the trades and so he owned a pickup (needed for its towing capacity). It was a "proper" pickup with an 8 foot box as well. He built kitchens and needed a large trailer to bring the cabinets to the customers house and install them. The 8 foot box allowed him to load 4x8's into the back without the trailer if needed.
I was forced to drive a pickup as well given I lived there and at the time it was the only car he had (later he got a compact car).
I don't have any issues with pickups, they are a valuable tool for many in the trades. when i drove his pickup i moved over, it was a very simple thing to do and was basic human decency.
The problem is the weekend-warrior types. I will never understand why they feel a need to do the things they do. Even buying these 4-foot box trucks makes little sense. I see them at Lowes/HomeDepot from time to time struggling to get 2x4x8's into the back while i can easily load 2x10x12's into my compact Hyundai Elantra and still close the trunk? like what did you get the truck for?
There was a time you were looked down upon for driving a pickup (blue collar worker) now they seem to be some sort of status symbol?
Part of it is marketing. You have a ton of commercials featuring trucks, treating them as glamourous. You even have Chevy sponsoring musicians to showcase Chevy trucks on their shows [0].
Plus, the price on some of these trucks (not just MSRP, but of course, including gas) outpace their utility, so yeah, some really are just a show of wealth.
0 - https://media.chevrolet.com/media/us/en/chevrolet/home.detai...
Said another way, I don't understand why going electric precludes muscle cars.
If anything, it seems like they have an opportunity to make them even faster when they are electrified.
More seriously, a successful electric car needs a chassis that's been engineered to be an electric car. You can convert a normal front engine, rwd chassis, but it's always a compromise.
For example: Blaring Whitesnake.
"My neighbor is enjoy this song so much, he through a brick through my window to hear it better!"
No, the reason there's no market for an electric Challenger et al is because the electric one doesn't sound right.
Around here, it seems pretty much every other pony car (Challenger, Mustang, Camaro) has reworked the exhaust system to "sound better", so it can be enjoyed by everyone else within a mile as they do their full throttle runs down empty street at night.
It should also be noted that Cadillac has already (year or so ago?) stated they won't be making any more ICE performance cars. All of their future ones will be electric. I doubt this is GM wide, pretty sure the ICE Corvette is filed in GMs "cold, dead hands" drawer.
It does seem a bit smaller, never saw the two side by side. But stylistically, it's a Challenger.
Safety standards are getting strict enough that they do influence the physical shape of the car, because the physical shape of the car influences your options for how to dissipate energy in a collision.
They'd probably have real problems with a Barracuda.
The Charger/Challenger were the same way. Th '70s originals were built on the old Dodge Coronet platform-low and wide. The new (current) ones, built on the Chrysler LX platform shared much of their hidden sheetmetal with the Mercedes W210/W211 E-class; so instead of low and wide, they're tall and narrow, more like a German luxury sedan. Without, you know, the good visibility.
https://www.barrons.com/amp/articles/dodge-charger-electric-...
0: https://www.motorbiscuit.com/ford-exec-says-this-is-why-it-s...
1: https://media.ford.com/content/fordmedia/feu/en/news/2021/12...
Electric cars just can't reproduce that. they can be faster, quicker, better off the line...but they don't FEEL the same.
EVs are not completely silent, but often times the sounds of the environment are louder, thus making EVs harder to notice through hearing.
I think that hobby is more what draws folks than the raw performance.
So there's some good news for the Mopar fanboys.
But I have seen the new Corvette a ton, perhaps because it resembles a Ferrari.