There Goes the American Muscle Car
thedispatch.com
https://web.archive.org/web/20250828210304/https://thedispatch.com/article/dodge-challenger-muscle-cars/
https://archive.ph/DEtKt
thedispatch.com
https://archive.ph/DEtKt
We are going through a culture change in society.
Many younger kids don’t view cars as the gateway to freedom and coming of age experiences. (Which is fine)
Combined with the brutal performance of modern EV cars. Muscle cars seem like a waste of time/energy/money/complexity. Logically it makes no sense.
I’m currently going through an identity crisis (as a gearhead) as a result of this.
[1] One take on the fall of Intel was that they were "high on their own supply" for the last 15 years and journalists were too intimidated to tell them they were wrong with the exception of Charlie Demerjian
My second car was a 1978 Buick Riviera. 17.5 feet in length, two doors, rear wheel drive, 403cuin 8 cylinder. It weighs in at 3500 lbs, had 15 mph rated bumpers with shocks attached to the frame. Steel roll cage, double steel doors.
The car was a beast. You could fit 7 adults in the car and two dead bodies in the trunk.
My grandmother was t-boned in it. They straightened the door and replaced the glass and it was good as new.
That was a big car!
I wish I could buy a car like that with modern antilock brakes, transmission. Instead it’s all trucks and SUVs because people like my mother feel “safer” and like seeing from up high.
Look at the specs of a modern vehicle. Any contact over 5mph and you are replacing the plastic bumper. Actually have an airbag go off and you are probably looking at a totaled vehicle.
I'm torn, though, on your idea to have a car like that with modern (safety) features. I hate all the trucks and SUVs out on the road, and I drive a mid-sized sedan. And I agree with you on how easy it is to damage that car. But man those old cars were so heavy. I can't imagine getting decent gas mileage (or good BEV range) on one today.
Admitedly I'm not a car guy, but isn't this by design? Crumple zones and all.
The degree to which crumple zones attenuate forces felt in a crash is fairly minimal in low speed crashes because in order to have enough time for airbags to inflate in a 100+mph crash they are necessarily quite stiff.
Modern cars don't have external bumpers and what you see on the outside of the car is a "bumper cover". The actual bumper is under that and no longer spans the whole front/rear of the car to the sides. Many new front bumpers don't go past the headlights.
So in a 5mph crash in a modern car, the bumper cover (made of plastic and held on by plastic) takes the impact and generally gets destroyed. Replacing it costs several hundred dollars in parts before paint (because they're all painted). There's also more labor involved in replacing it because it's so integrated to the car. Bumper covers now clip into both fenders, core support, and undercladding and removal means working with all of those parts, then lining up body lines after.
I think it's less a comment about serious accidents and more a comment on getting rear ended at a stop light now costing $600+ in repairs even if your airbags didn't pop.
If your want to survive hitting stopped traffic at 40mph because you were too busy shitposting in traffic, modern car all the way. Depending on the details you may very well walk away without a scratch. It's really marvelous how good they are at keeping people uninjured, or at least alive.
But the overwhelming majority of people's driving experience reflects the former accident type, not the latter, hence why people have the opinions they do. And you can't really blame them. The odds of any given person being in an injurious accident in their life are low, lower still if you avoid a few key behaviors everyone agrees are bad.
40-50yr ago in the era of 10mph bumpers and whatnot the typical experience was superior because the typical driver is experiencing minor no-injury mishaps. Sliding off the road in the snow at low speed was a tow truck bill and only that, not $2k just to get the car drivable again.
Buuuuuuut, the results for the minority of drivers experiencing injurious crashes was way, way worse back then, as the people who screech about stats are happy to tell you.
What makes a car cheap to repair for the average user getting in the median or average accident and survivable for the guy who gets piss drunk and drives off a cliff are mostly tangential from each other. There's no reason we can't have both and there's no reasonable and non-malicious reason to hide or downplay the regression on this axis. Modern cars would likely perform way better than old cars if shrugging off minor accidents was not a decreased design priority due to stiffer cabins and other changes in construction.
The stuff that makes modern cars get totaled in minor hits is mostly a reflection of styling and fuel economy based choices.
The thing that makes modern cars so easy to total is unibody construction. We do that to save on costs, but also because it leads to better ride quality and fuel efficiency.
I've seen a number of crash test videos comparing modern 21st century cars in collisions with solid, unmovable obstacles at high speed, compared to those old cars, and while yes, the old cars had external features that let them more cheaply and functionally deal with minor accidents, they would be totaled by any truly heavy impact, with lethal results for their drivers.
Modern cars on the other hand may be more externally fragile even for minor hits and easily get damaged in ways that lead to thousands in repair costs for all their interconnected, electronically sensitive alarms and sensors, but for enduring high-velocity impacts, they're often fucking tanks when it comes to fundamentally protecting their occupants. Under that fragile exterior of any decent modern car is a remarkable security construct that isn't easily visible, right up until it shows its mettle after your car slams into a wall, and keeps you alive, at some speed that would have annihilated some supposedly tough muscle car from the 70s.
Go search for these on YouTube, they viscerally showcase the difference in the best (and most entertaining) possible way, by trying to catastrophically destroy both kinds of car.
There's a lot of electronic tracking, spyware, junkware, over-complication pushing that I absolutely despise about the modern auto manufacturing industry (partly because of legal mandates and partly out of general shittiness from the makers themselves) but for safety, they're impressive.
EDIT: Here's just one example. The occupants of the Malibu would have survived this crash with minor injuries. Anyone driving the 59 Bel Air would have been turned into a mangled disaster of broken bones and crushed body parts. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=uoShPiK6878
Remember that the US auto companies spent billions of dollars in marketing and lying to people that they "need" vehicles the size of tanks.
I go for walks in the morning and there's a road bottleneck and it's hilarious and sad to see the cars queueing up on both sides, huge ones, with a single person in them, every morning.
I do own a station wagon, and it's shorter than most SUVs, and I use it for long trips, but let's be realistic, that's not what most drives are.
Most of the time people drive sedans alone.
If people bought based purely on passenger need 99% of vehicles on the road should be 2-seat coupes, pickups and vans.
It seems like a different world but before the pandemic if you wanted to buy a compact car you would go to the dealer and find out they don't have any new ones, you'll have to settle for used, they say factory washed out in a flood. Well they have 100 SUVs made in the same factory lined up that nobody wants to buy that are $7000 off.
Even if I lived outside a city, what do I gain by driving a smaller car? Going from 35 to 55 mpg? Parking is plentiful and equally convenient for big cars these days.
cities are better with fewer cars and better public transit. and you dont need a tank. i didnt know your viewpoint even existed.
I personally don't understand how you could consider an SUV better for handling or fun, but denying people's views doesn't make them not hold them.
1: https://www.sciencedirect.com/science/article/abs/pii/S22146...
This is an imagination problem. There are certain categories of automotive use cases which SUVs are designed to be superior. In those, being in a vehicle designed to handle better at the task is better fun!
For example, taking an SUV off road.
Not even. Buying thrift store furniture is a wildly different experience in a modern crossover than it is a sedan or even an old station wagon.
We have more sedans here in the city (Seattle) because our parking space frankly are too small, and even then I see way too many SUVs trying to cram into a parking space labelled compact.
Or at least, a vehicle the size of a Hummer H1. But, would be willing to try out a Marauder, because they look like they’re a blast.
I had tiny sports cars growing from 16-30 years old. They were fun in a different way.
1. https://www.topgear.com/car-news/modified/behold-500bhp-295k...
2. https://www.motor1.com/news/27190/marauder-armored-vehicle-f...
The fact is that modern cars have astonishingly effective safety features that are likely to get you alive out of most crashes regardless of the size of your vehicle. The Insurance Institute for Highway Safety publishes data that shows that larger vehicles are safer but it is not like you die in the smaller car most of the time, but rather you are more likely to break your ankle or something.
If your vehicle goes under the tractor pulled by a semi (any size) or if it flips over the guardrail because it's too big to be held by the guardrail you do die.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_countries_by_traffic-r...
I don't think it's ever been logical but it ticks important emotional boxes so that makes sense.
I'm old and I drive a refurb'd Leaf and have never ever cared that my vehicle was not sexy. I've never been "normal" so never had the appeal but I understand it.
I would challenge you that it is your proclivity for logic that is causing your identity crisis. If you enjoy a certain aesthetic, the pursuit of that aesthetic is reason enough. You are already putting constraints on the concept of a car because strapping a rocket on wheels with wings is going to have much more performance than an EV. Redefine your pursuit to be the most performant muscle car and everything is squared. No identity crisis needed.
I’m morphing love of modifying cars away from performance numbers but into a way to build mechanical art and enjoy emotional moments with other humans.
I’ve realized that was the whole point all along. EV or IC it doesn’t matter. Just the statements above
* Don't change lanes if the blinky light on your side mirrors tells you not to
* Don't back up unless the image in the backup camera tells you it's safe
* Stop reversing when the beeping from the park distance sensors get too insistent
* AEB, lane departure warning, rear traffic assist radar, etc.
Don't get me wrong, people have used this "old man yells at cloud" point of view to call "real cars" dead for many decades; fuel injection, ABS, automatic transmissions, whatever. But we've definitely gotten to a tipping point where most of the fun is gone.
I'm not saying we should go back to x% more deaths per year by getting rid of XYZ nanny system, I'm just saying car enthusiasm is largely dead in new cars.
Car culture has killed livable cities and I am not going to miss loud and obnoxious cruisers playing games on public roads
And yet, I mourn the loss of what we once had, and I'm trying to scoop up fun cars while I still can.
There are more vehicles on the roads than ever before, and each of those distracted travellers demands a direct route from home to destination whether they're driving or being driven by a robo-taxi.
LA was beautiful in the 20s. Could have been a world class metropolis instead of a sprawling hellscape of seven lane interstates where it takes 1.5hr to travel 15 miles, choked by pollution.
Go watch Roger Rabbit again. Pay attention to the villain instead of the foxy redhead.
All those tropes, jokes, memes and other culture crapping on various slices of that broader demographic don't come from nowhere.
I'm glad that all these assistants exist for road vehicles. I think of myself as a fairly disciplined driver (welly who am I kidding, really?), but these systems have saved my bacon more than once over the years.
It's worse with tesla - the Plaid has removed most driver controls.
If you're a car guy and buy a 1000hp+ vehicle, I think you would want a drive select or turn signal stalk.
You can't flash your lights. wipers are not under your control. if you're sticking out into traffic, you don't know if the car will guess correctly that you want to back up... or pull out. nonsense.
Look, no way about it, most of the drivers of muscle cars today are grey headed old men. They're the only ones that can afford them.
The next big demo for muscle cars is via exorbitant leases that select for idiots. Which yeah, now we're talking younger men with testosterone, at least.
Being an old man now too, I'm fairly certain that dumb testosterone laden guys with a loud and fast car are still gonna get the girls, but I can't be 100 on that anymore.
Still thats the next demo down. It's mostly old farts on Harleys and in Mustangs (unless you're near Paris Island or San Diego, of course)
That's just really a dangerous amount of power for a daily driver. A lot of electric drivers don't realize how much the potential power is taken down in daily driving to keep it safe. But Camaro LT's have a sport mode where the backend can get loose with just a squirt of acceleration.
Cars like that are insane. It's just not safe to drive cars like that on city street anywhere near their potential.
Yes, the economics have changed. And so has scalability.
For today's young adults, vehicle cost and total cost of ownership have made ownership of private vehicles another "shining artifact of the past." [0]
But you know what else? Populated cities have dense traffic. Racing with full acceleration to reach the next intersection's red light is obviously futile.
People are more worried about having a roof and four walls.
[0] to quote L. Cohen
I was at a track day last year in my bmw 3 series and there was a Tesla 3 in my run group in front of me, "lowered" slightly with Eibach springs.
During the pandemic I got a Camaro convertible with a manual. I love that car but it is hard to defend on functional grounds. A Tesla plaid will blow it off on the line. There are a lot of cars that are ten times more functional that are as good or better on the track.
I have kids who don't care about cars, took their time getting their driver license. As someone who grew up California I can't understand that. But cars allowed me to do things they can do without cars. And they live in an objectively safer and more stressful world, so I can see why they don't want to add driving to it.
Here's what I like about what I drive. It's fun, silly and orange. People look at it and know I like my car but they don't think I am rich dude with a fancy Porsche or Mercedes. All kinds of very pedestrian cars are faster, but I live in Los Angeles and I get to enjoy the weather.
We're decades past the time when a 1960s car was remotely competitive on any measurable aspect of performance but, just as rock climbing is not a valid competitor for taking a train/ski lift/whatever to the top of a mountain, there will always be those that revel in the joy of doing something that calls to our more primitive selves.
Muscle cars are the essence of being young... they're unreasonable, loud, reckless, and beautiful.
I think we're a long way off self-driving cars in earnest, but we're in the shorter term leaving behind the idea of cars as something where their performance in some way correlates with social status. As hard as you try, you can't deny that element is there for gearheads and tuners - it's writ large across the Fast film franchise.
I view it as much like having an appreciation of Steam Trains and older aircraft!
Still interesting and the best are machines worthy of our ongoing attention.
FWIW I own an old Porsche 911 and an alarmingly fast EV.
I love them both.
When I get back in to the old 911, I think to myself, how the bloody hell was this even legal! It feels dangerous and exciting all at the same time. It's an event every time I turn the key and it starts making noises and the gauges spring into life and lights and switches start glowing. Then you turn the key from a cold start and listen to the sound, and you get to know exactly the state of tune. You dont even need to drive it very fast or very far and it makes you feel alive in a way my EV never does!
Now when I get in and drive my EV, it works in an astonishingly safe and effective way every time. When you stamp on the accelerator it will immediately rocket forwards in a way that makes the occupants of the car feel sick LOL
The acceleration in an EV tapers off, whereas in an older performance cat the performance builds in a more exciting way I think.
But as I say, it's like being a Steam Train enthusiast. They are what they are, from a time when they did what they did.
I think this might be like the yamaha v-max motorcycle. It wasn't as fast as other motorcycles, but the way the throttle opened up at a certain rpm range made the boost seem exciting.
Current daily is a fast EV. The next project car I build will be some flavor of an outlaw SWB 911
There is something about it being analog that feels great. I have the same feeling for older Ducatis
No shit...
> The average monthly car loan payment in the U.S. is $745 for new vehicles and $521 for used ones
> In the first quarter of 2025, the overall average auto loan interest rate was 6.73% for new cars and 11.87% for used cars.
He had a 2000 Cadillac Eldorado he was very fond of. Drove that thing everywhere. He had to junk it -- the whole thing -- because some rain got into the sun roof and messed up one of the computers -- and aftermarket motherboards were not available. If he were willing to entertain computers in cars before, he wasn't afterward. Purely mechanical is where it's at. Me, I'm concerned that encroaching electronics means turning cars into smartphones on wheels. Things that want to shut down and do software updates when you want to go for a drive. And heaven help you if the update has bugs in it, or if the manufacturer decides to try out innovative new UI paradigms! (Patch 4.3.21: You can now use the gearshift to select songs in the media player! Great!) And that's before we get into the "features that are in the car, but disabled and paywalled with nothing but a software flag" issue.
I have a feeling that the enshittification of vehicles means there will be a small but vocal community of young people who rediscover the joys of purely mechanical vehicles from the 1960s and 1970s, the same way young people have discovered and appreciated 80s music, or video games from around the turn of the millennium.
A related issue: Analog radio is going away. It used to be that you could put together a crude but serviceable AM radio using a handful of spare parts. Kids would build them with components bought for a few bucks at Radio Shack. This could let you receive, for example emergency broadcasts in a pinch. If everything is converted to packetized digital radio, or worse, TCP/IP "radio", suddenly the complexity threshold you need to pick up a broadcast jumps.
Some of the most fascinating technologies to me are ones that are relatively simple, but which get you far. The Polynesians were able to explore much of the vast Pacific Ocean using sturdy canoes and navigation techniques that required no special equipment, just observation and a body of knowledge passed down through the generations. Our complex culture seems to be losing the ability to build and make use of simpler technology (though as concerns marine navigation, the US Navy has reintroduced navigation by LORAN and astronavigation as a part of cadet training).
It's not freeing because it's been saddled with all sorts of financial burdens raising the cost while at the same time younger people are poorer than ever.
It's not just cars, tons of traditional "coming of age" things are going away for the same reasons.
Here's an old movie: "Hot Rod Girl" (1956) [2] The opening scenes are of a real drag strip in Southern California. Technical advice from the San Fernando Drag Strip and the National Hot Rod Association. Accelerations are so low that those things would be obstructing traffic on a freeway onramp today.
Anyone can launch a Model S or Taycan at insane accelerations just by pushing a pedal and letting the computer sort things out.
Trying to do so in a 1970s Camaro or a 1980s Sierra XR4 requires skill and practice whilst listening to the howl of the engine, feeling the texture of the road through the steering and sensing the suspension loading-up. All of that has been lost.
Driving has been reduced to an ordeal to be ensured with as little interaction with the vehicle as possible.
Contrary to people praising the transcendental spiritual experience of burning gas and shifting gear, who obviously are the creme de la creme of what an independent and strong human intellect is capable of.
I also liked cars as a kid, because of all the money funnelled in toy cars, car movies, car games, car magazines, at some point I realised it was just a gigantic multi generational ad campaign from the beginning, I started questioning my belief, and has it turns out I didn't really know why I dreamed of owning these expensive metal boxes, it felt like a very artificial goal, almost as if it was pushed on my from the outside...
Most people who like their cars and their Oreos or whatever else do so genuinely.
https://medium.com/better-marketing/nestle-japan-coffee-4640...
How many people finally buy their 911 thinking they'll have "made it" just to realise it's yet another trinket trophy of the never ending rat race? If my comment made even a single person question their opinions I'll be content, as for the others I don't really care, it's not my time nor money, do what you please
Perhaps a certain minority enjoys pushing buttons, pulling levers and pressing pedals to move your butt around, heck I enjoy it too.
But when I am leaving for work at 5:30AM I am much happier to be seated comfortably in a train and letting someone else move me around while I take a nap
On the 5:59 train from Zürich to Basel, there is no chance of this happening. It’s an extremely pleasant ride on the DB ICE, up until Basel.
On the afternoon or evening trains(there’s one every 30 minutes) I have also never felt threatened. Although I typically get a 1st class ticket on my way back home because it gets kind of crowded with all the families and retired folks in 2nd. class, and I prefer to nap in peace.
If my company weren’t paying for my tickets, I’d probably go in the 2nd class as well.
Perhaps your society has some issues if you feel threatened in public spaces.
I'm so happy not having to own a car anymore and I hope I never have to drive again. Also, €22 for all my travel needs for a month is amazing
Yeah, and once society progressed beyond the bare minimum to accomplish that goal a whole host of ancillary nice to have bonus goals (style, comfort, etc) opened up.
Let's hope that trend continues, ideally to the point that humans need to do nothing besides specify where they want to go. We're too careless to be trusted with the responsibility.
Americans today are also a lot more stuck up/image conscious. Grandma thought it was cool/impressive grandpa built a car out of junk, the average date today would call that worse than a poverty wagon and make someone undateable. I have a stick shift Ford Focus ST. It's incredibly fun to drive, practical, good for the environment, but it definitely turns dates away because it's a poverty wagon.
My 2018 Subaru Forester does 0-60 in 6.3 s
Imagine you're getting smoked by a 7 year old dad-mobile with paddle shifters. And I'm not even running a Cobb tune. That isn't a muscle car. That's a synthol car.
https://www.burnsmotors.com/cdjr-research/dodge-charger-0-60...
Besides, Muscle cars are often more about torque and the front-engine rwd layout. In the 70s they were all slow as shit but could still peel tires and do burnouts.
Also, for those in-the-know, the mid 2000s Honda Accord v6 was about as fast as the mustang of that time, but obviously drove very different.
A Suzuki GSX-1000 can do it in 2.5s.
https://www.zeroto60times.com/vehicle-make/rivian-0-60-mph-t...
2024 Tesla Model 3 Performance - 2.8 seconds
Getting smoked by a soccer mom
Likewise the _standard_ Tesla 3 has quite a bit different 0 to 60 times than what you've quoted here.
Do you really think your soccer mom is buying the "performance" edition of the vehicle and not the "long range?" Which proves the point, performance options are not dead, and EVs only continue the trend, they don't obviate it.
https://www.motorauthority.com/news/1145870_2025-xiaomi-su7-...
I don't worry about being smoked by any Subaru (loved my WRX in the day) but dual motor Teslas? I ease off.
As I've grown older though, I noticed that the less I need to drive, the happier I am. So I don't really need more than an appliance, I suppose.
A Model 3 might check a lot of boxes, but its styling is definitely not unique, and the rest of car itself is tying to appeal to as many as possible.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=6mtFYUOvYs8
A couple of thousand acres, big sheds, a couple of silos, a few trucks and combine harvesters and a go hard or go home frequently sideways attitude 'll do that, it seems.
In a similar manner a mechanic that works on aircraft engines for crop dusters capable of short take off and landing with heavy loads and drafting over fields with low clearance can also enjoy tuning the heck out of a V-8 and taking it to the limit.
It's not insecurity driving that behavior, it's confidence veering into over confidence.
You can see that same let's have a go and push it mentality in building MudCrab underwater EV cars
https://www.abc.net.au/news/2023-07-30/nt-world-record-darwi...
and MudSkipper not boat not aircraft: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=1ILbQHnHPnY
https://techstory.in/teslas-roadster-2-0-still-coming-still-...
With a 0-60 of 9 seconds, the Fiat 500e may be too low power. A 1993 Honda Civic is quicker than that and if you optioned a Civic coupe up to what comes standard (AC, power doors and windows, cruise) on the 500e, it was $14,700 in 1993[1], which is ~$32k today, which almost the same exact price of a 500e.
And you even get more than one airbag now!
The Bolt is also a great example, although it's pretty quick. In fact, a quick chatgpt search says both the Bolt and Leaf SV are over 200hp, so not a lot less than my 258hp Model 3 that's undoubtedly heavier.
The Kona EV completely slipped my mind; my sister has the hybrid version though. Although, the EV is a >$30k crossover but they _do_ sell a 138hp version so it's hardly a muscle car. There are no small cheap Hyundai EVs in the US.
Something like the Honda E is something I'd love to see in the US, although it's definitely a premium-priced product for a small car.
Small low power EVs are everywhere.
Unless you’re setting the bar so low that you expect a tiny 50-100 mile range car. That’s not going to happen because everyone would pass right over it and get an affordable EV with multiple times the range for only marginally more cost.
There's a similar issue to muscle cars in that although in theory my thing can do 155 mph down some autobahn, in practice it's way slower than the 15 mph ebike in town.
Honda, Toyota, Cadillac, Ford are the major performance cars these days... And Hyundai has a much bigger investment than Dodge. The consolidation of Mercedes, VW, Porsche, and Audi is an interesting challenge to the segment; Bmw and Mazda are also in the game.
Maybe more importantly, either of the above had an appealing visual style (to some!) and had their own community around them. Teslas are pretty visually boring, you can't really modify them, but I suppose they have a community of their own who debates which version of software drives the car for you better.
I had a MINI. That was a build quality disaster. Major engine issues after only three years. I now have a Silverado 1500 LTZ. It has obvious build quality issues. Interior isn’t as good as it used to be. Gearbox has a banging sound. My Teslas seem so much better than either of those or most other cars I interact with really. I sat in my friends Toyota Camry the other day. The interior seemed so much cheaper, the sound quality so much worse, the cabin was so much more loud than my humble Model 3. What about my car has poor build quality that I am oblivious to?
Tesla panel gaps and quality are fine. They had some early issues, but the damn things are basically body panels hung off of almost entirely cast chunks of metal. There is not a lot of room for wiggle. If anything, they're so we'll integrated that they're hard to repair after a crash.
I’ve had several Teslas and even currently have their supposed disaster of a truck and have not encountered this alleged build quality issue. My car before that, a Honda Civic, spent much more time in the shop purely on account that it needed oil changes and expensive scheduled maintenances once or twice a year.
Your hydraulic brake systems need to be flushed every couple years to prevent corrosion, even if you don’t use them.
The main example is the panel gaps on Tesla body. They can be offset by a "large" amount compared to other car brands, but it doesn't harm anything and you have to look for it to be noticeable.
So do Tesla's have a bad build quality? Yes, if you define it by tolerances, but no if you define it by "Does it feel low quality". And the debate online is largely with people talking past each other with differing definitions of what build quality actually means.
> They can be offset by a "large" amount compared to other car brands
The funny thing is that whenever I get into a Tesla, the interior just feels kinda cheap and of low-quality/low-effort design. That's not saying anything about their build quality, though.
Mercedes, BMW, Volvo, Audi, Honda, Toyota, Accura, Lexus....
I'm not actually sure any EV could capture what people like about muscle cars, but you're definitely not going to get it from some futuristic transport blob that just happens to have a low 0-60 time. The Tesla roadster might have captured some of the sports car magic, but it's telling they don't make that any more (for now). I don't know if they could do the same thing for muscle cars at all.
That's a big if. And even more so if everyone moves to EVs, then gas demand goes down and it ICEs become even cheaper to run. Ultimately, we need a carbon tax and no more EV credits. What did EV credits do for us? It created Elon.
That did not last, and I'm talking about before trade with Russia was basically halted.
- manual - V8 - 2 doors - under <$100k
I spent a week with one, and while I quite enjoyed it, it required you to really rev out the engine to feel anything (which is nice!). Except that would push you into 130km/h+ which means instant loss of license for 6 months and a forever tarnished record meaning insurance is much more expensive for the rest of your life.
Settled for an ND2 MX-5 that I throw around corners now. It means I have to have a "normal" car as a daily (as the MX-5 isn't that practical) but it also means I can have fun without getting pulled up by the gestapo
We have much lower road fatalities than the USA per 100,000 people and per billion km traveled though the rates in remote areas are considerably higher.
For every other road, 25km/h+ is instant loss of license. This is for Vic btw
https://online.fines.vic.gov.au/Your-options/Fine-amounts-an...
I'd rather have an EV conversion vintage VW Westy, Defender 110, Citroën DS, or Ferrari 250 GT California, or a fuggly Thing, Edsel, or Lada.
Here's one vendor: https://www.evwest.com/
I really want to ditch the 1.9L H4 Digijet in my '85 Westfalia. It's a total PITA (direct fuel injection and a distributor) but I'm not keen on dropping in a GoWesty or "Subagon" ICE motor when EV is the way to go.
I have a friend who does the copart thing, maybe I'll have him keep an eye out for a cheap wrecked Tesla
I'd trust my weak ass diesel engine to drive me to hell and back, but I know that won't last.
doing an EV conversion on a body kit is my dream car.
Although I like your style of doing a Thing or an Edsel!
You'd miss out on the unique gear pattern on the Thing haha.
This, IMO, is exactly why they are dying. They are more expensive than regular cars and the only reason anyone likes them is because they are loud and obnoxious.
There's just fewer and fewer people that need a loud noise maker to be happy, certainly not when that noise maker will cost you $60k you likely don't have since inflation has gone crazy while salaries have stagnated.
The people that do end up gravitating to the noise makers will choose a loud motorcycle instead.
This is just not true.
also supports the upthread claim.
My electric family sedan (Tesla model 3 long range) has everything I've ever liked about muscle cars - in abundance. 498 horsepower, a "first gear" that will wind up past 200 kph, instant throttle response. The only thing missing are the impracticalities - the noise, the small back seat, the smell of tires and soot and oil leaking from somewhere. Oh, and the oil changes, and the plug changes, and the stolen catalytic converters, and the coils that go bad, and the fan clutch, and the PCV system, and the fuel/oil/air filter maintenance, and the drive belt, and the injectors, and the exhaust manifold gaskets, and the muffler, and the yearly smog checks.
The sound profile of a V8 is very different from the 4-cylinder and similar I’m shopping for of course, but the principle still applies. I also just don’t want to be my neighbor who finds it necessary to come and go at odd hours in the most abrasive manner possible.
> There's just fewer and fewer people that need a loud noise maker to be happy,
Come to south Queens NYC and you'll find plenty of these people. There's a shop around the block from me that builds these noise makers and I get to hear them test drive them up and down the block.
Also, the loud sound != big. V8 != Loud, esp when many v6 motors are close in displacement to Ford's 5 liter V8.
A nice, tactile gear change is particularly pleasurable as well. And sounds do go along with all this, but they don't necessarily need to be loud.
I can imagine a bizarro version of this comment where a future person in a world where all of your caloric needs are met by a pill you take daily, ranting about how food enthusiasts insist on shoving their smelly food up your nostrils as you walk by an unnecessary-in-this-day-and-age restaurant, and how they only do it to annoy other people.
As opposed to the 60k for a nice Tesla??
New cars are being made. Sure this might kinda suck. But most of the enthusiast are driving and loving cars from the 1970's that have been out of production for decades right?
Saying EV's kill muscle cars is like saying Cars killed of horse riding.
Sure, there are less breeders for day-to-day travelling requirement style stuff, but the hobbyists keep everything going, and in some ways I would imagine it will bring round a golden era where these things aren't required to be useful as day-to-day options and can just be for fun
But it wasn't necessarily a great car. It had a lot of condensation on the inside of the car in the morning. I've never seen that in any other car. My suitcase barely fit in the back. Etc. A lot of form over function in that car.
I don't own a car. In fact, I've never owned one. I just rent cars when I need them, which isn't all that often these days. I live in Berlin which is a big city that wile car friendly (by European standards) is a bit of a PITA to get around in by car. And there's public transport. And it takes about fifty minutes to even leave the city in a car because you are stuck in stop start traffic. But if I ever move out, I might need a car.
If I ever buy a car, it will be electric. ICE cars are relics of the past. That mustang makes pleasing vroom vroom noises (and they are very pleasing) but that's about it. That's what they are optimized for. Even a modest EV has more torque (the whole point of a muscle car), better handling, etc. And they are just a lot more practical. EV performance breaks the illusion that a muscle car is, well, a muscle car.
As for EVs being boring. Many of them are. Especially those in the US because it's currently cut off from the rest of the world and not exactly state of the art at this point. If you want exciting EVs to lust after, go to China. They have them in every shape and size. The new xpeng looks great, there's the huawei car, the BYD u7 and u9. And some of those are quite affordable (in China). They are unobtainium elsewhere of course, which adds to their desirability.
I don't speak from experience of course, but I do watch a lot of EV reviews. There's this myth that EVs can't be fun. They can be. It's not about the noise but it is about the highly tunable driving experience, ridiculous torque, etc. What works for muscle cars (big engine, light weight car) also works for EVs. Some of the more affordable fun options are smaller, lighter cars. Even retro conversions of classic sports cars can be a lot of fun apparently. And some of those end up being lighter after their conversion and handle better than the original.
And I bet there are a few classic muscle car conversions. Are they still fun if you take away the vroom vroom noise but otherwise increase all the performance metrics? I don't know. It probably still is quite a lot of fun to drive one.
I think they will be one soon, say, 25 years from now, but I don't think we're quite there yet, at least not in America where a family fun trip can be 5 days of driving thousands of miles for camping or tourism purposes.
Fast charging needs to be ubiquitous, and charging needs to be faster, batteries need to get better, ranges need to get longer, and EVs need to get cheaper, and you need to give the whole system time to transition once those do become available.
All of that has to happen in order to relicize the ice vehicle.
Every time I see a car zipping in and out of lanes at 90 mph with no turn signal, it’s a BMW.
And similarly for the boomers with goatees and USA tees with Corvettes.
And similarly for Camaros with aftermarket exhausts that seem to exist for no reason other than irritating your neighbors.
I don’t want to be associated with that.
I know it’s shallow, but then again, so am I…
Mustangs got the reputation because they were cheap power with a solid rear end which made peeling out into a turn incredibly unstable.
i owned one. it was quite loud. Not as loud as the 240SX i took the muffler off to have a shop look at it up the road, but still, pretty loud.
I still drive a 4.6L V8, though. Just not american.
Mercedes did a neat thing with the exhaust on the C63, where you could flip a switch and switch between "neighborhood" and "open road" exhaust profiles. I think it's one of the best sounding cars ever made.