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.
I know in my mind and heart that electrification is the way of the future. But a part of me is sad to lose iconic machines such as these. I'm a GenXer so I straddle that line of the past and the future. We're at the end of an era...
They both disappeared before (three times each), only to come back each time with a lot of fan fare. As long as the electric versions look like the originals (quite unlike the Mach-E) they'll do fine when they resurface.
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.
Tesla is the Gen-Z(possibly also Gen-Y) loyalty brand.
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.
My experience in my circles is the opposite regarding Tesla. They had first mover advantage of building an electric vehicle people actually wanted, but as great alternatives have started appearing, Teslas poor build quality becomes a bigger and bigger issue and to top if off their founders antics and politics rubbing younger people the wrong way. I now hear millennials and gen-z people actively avoiding the brand.
The sales numbers seem to indicate otherwise. Tesla has like ~70% marketshare even after all that has happened. However as an addendum, my comment is a prediction 5+ years from now. I fully believe that the numerous Chinese brands that are coming will capture most of the people you are talking about. The way you described it, those people seem like they are EV curious but not passionate. Tesla still has that loyal brand following and I believe it will still account for them being #1. I could see them at 25% marketshare when all is said and done. All the Chinese combined might be 30% and the the rest is divided among a handful of remaining companies.
The main point is getting 99% of consumer transport electrified.
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.
EV batteries just need to get to get...an order of magnitude higher energy density, so they can take up as much space and weigh as much as a full tank of gas, while giving the same amount of spare power to run the heater/AC and go 500 miles between charges, which (for a full one) should take no more than ten minutes.
As an aside, electric restomods are the height of gauchery. Like having a Patek Phillipe case with a Timex digital face.
That's strange to me... I loved the Challenger growing up (Vanishing Point!) but always thought the mid 2000s relaunch of these muscle cars was a bit unimpressive and kind of soulless. Maybe that's just a "when did you grow up" thing; maybe they were objectively good cars. But, to me that era has been gone for quite a while.
The base models are basically useless. When you get into the SRT/Hellcat trims and packages things get wild. The funny thing is that there's very little inbetween. You go from zero to insane very quickly.
An EV Miata would just be rebadged Toyota tech since Mazda does not have the money to produce the tech themselves.
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.
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.
I wish somebody like Kia or Tata would come out with a barebones roadster like the original Miatas which were callbacks to MGs. Something so simple that I wouldn't be too sad if I left the top down and it got rained on.
People still shell out $ for these things, this is just elite consensus via regulation and informal decision making shaping the market. The muscle car dies its second death the same way it died its first.
Yes and no... The enormously large footprint of these cars gets them an allowance that lets their engines be less efficient. The US federal government has required that, if you want a powerful car, you also have to have a large car (or, especially, a large SUV, which gets off easy both for its large footprint and for being classified as 'light truck'.)
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.
My point is, even though Dodge could make money by selling Challenger/Charger for at the very least a few more years, they will not. Despite what we are taught, democracy and market forces are not how things really work. There was never a vote on this, or any of those regulations.
It takes time to retool factories to move to whatever they are replacing this car with. The article states they are investing 2.8 Billion. Must be a lot of equipment they have to install.
Yet the massive trucks that obstruct the driver's vision to pedestrians, kids on bikes, and everything else are experiencing YoY growth.
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.
I ride my bike a fair bit and can you called it. Any time i am passed dangerously close it is ALWAYS a short-box pickup.
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.
I can't agree with this enough, and I think it has to do with dueling cultural values. Especially because I live in a very purple area. My interpretation is that the pickup drivers endanger my life to "own the libs" (people who ride bicycles).
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.
Those short-box pickups and their drivers are terrible (and it is almost always a short-box truck with its micro 4-foot box?)
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.
One major advantage of a pickup truck is carrying dirty stuff without getting the inside of an suv dirty. Even a small bed can carry things. Small bed pickup trucks make them easier to park and drive, they must be more efficient too. I would have probably chosen an suv version of the rivian if it was available, but only the pickup truck version was. The SUV style of the Rivian should be more fuel efficient than the truck version. The suv is almost available.
Just wait until those trucks are electric too and can accelerate as fast or faster than current electric cars.
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.
I don't hate on the acceleration. Being able to quickly get up to speed and slot yourself safely into traffic is important. EVs have taken quite a while to shake off the slowpoke penalty box. If we can make EVs sexy by making them quick, so much the better.
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.
So far this seems to be the only reasonable reply in this thread. There's a lot of "big truck bad" energy here. Like I said elsewhere - it's the driver. The vehicle doesn't move without the driver.
EV trucks are here now and they are fast. Both the F150-EV and the Rivian R1T are very fast because of their electric drive trains. I'm hoping not to see an increase in pedestrian accidents but time will tell.
> I'm hoping not to see an increase in pedestrian accidents but time will tell.
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.
So what should we do to prevent these needless injuries? I was thinking maybe rules about visibility? There's no reason in modern evs to have such giant front trunks blocking vision, as the engine isn't there. You could have a high clearance vehicle lowered front trunk I think.
Part of the solution would be designing and retrofitting roads so that they naturally slow traffic down. Smaller lanes, more frequent stops, more density (not skyscrapers but neighborhoods you love) where people frequently walk and bike so that vehicles just have to slow down. It’s not just the vehicle, that’s only part of the problem. Driving a truck should be uncomfortable in a city due to its size (like it would be in Europe), but not necessarily on the highway or rural roads.
There's a terrifying race between cars getting bigger/heavier/faster while being piloted by every-more distracted drivers, and autonomous driving technology. I'm hoping that those at Waymo are making the right tradeoffs between their own product's safety and the danger of not having a better-than-human driving system like theirs more widely deployed.
1/4 mile became the standard measure for a good reason. 0-60 is just as much a measure of traction as it is of acceleration and you can go to a drag strip and test your car against others legally in 1/4 mile.
Nobody is calling for a ban on trucks. In fact, trucks are awesome and needed by all kinds of people. We’re asking to stop enforcing truck way of life with endless, unaffordable highway expansion and focusing on truck development and transit at the expense of everything else. If you spent less time feeling threatened and more time getting other people off the road so that they can walk, bike, or take public transit such as buses and street cars your own experience owning a truck and using it for your activities would be enhanced. It’s a mistake to believe that trucks are at odds with proper transit.
In addition, the main issue w.r.t visibility here isn’t limited to trucks. But given that we make vehicles bigger and faster and we design highways that encourage faster transit we inevitably cause more deaths and destruction and a net expense on society that can be avoided by getting more people off the road and slowing traffic way down except on interstate highways between cities.
It also doesn’t make sense to ban pedestrians or people walking, given that we live on Earth.
Most non-extreme people are just calling for their societies to stop subsidizing your truck and truck-related way of life, but I can definitely see how the very slight degradation of an extraordinarily privileged position would feel like an assault on the core of your being.
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.
In this regard, electric cars are worse even than 'normal' cars. They're too quiet. If recently one of the car brands did not introduce a (very too quiet) beep on one of their EVs when reversing, I would have been ran over in a parking lot. And my hearing is more than fine (to the point that I have to disconnect electronics when sleeping because I hear them).
EVs are not completely silent, but often times the sounds of the environment are louder, thus making EVs harder to notice through hearing.
Right? I don't know why they couldn't have just (or also) put an electric drivetrain in a regular Mustang. My two theories are (a) somebody at Ford really hates cars that aren't SUV/crossovers[0], or (b) the Mach E is an attempt to appeal to the aging demographic of people who wanted Mustangs as kids in the 60s/70s. Ford's marketing definitely seems to promote the Mach E for older people.[1]
Can you upgrade parts of an electric vehicle to improve performance? Can you "tune" an electric vehicle? I honestly don't know; I don't own one and was never into tuning my vehicles for performance.
I think that hobby is more what draws folks than the raw performance.
Or, like my wonderful neighbor, want to remove their muffler to show off how awesome they are.
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.
Surely that goal is far easier to meet with electric cars, not less? As many electric manufacturers have already demonstrated, it's relatively straightforward to fit a 500-1000 breakhorsepower EV motor into pretty much any chassis you want. Just add two if you want to realy go nuts. An EV Challenger that slaps a Hellcat in literally every category other than sound and how fast it drinks fuel should satisfy those needs no?
But as we've seen with Tesla, Rivian and others, electric is no barrier to horsepower. Horsepower is a barrier to range, but that's a different problem.
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.
They did the same thing that Jaguar did, when they went from the late-70s underpinnings of the X308 XJ to the all-new X350 XJ in 2003. The style cues...the first things that meet the eye; the curve of the rear fender and the shape of the headlights-those things were kept-but the proportions of the car are different. The new one was taller and narrower, with a proportionally smaller greenhouse. It takes a while to see it; but it's a dramatic difference when you do.
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.
It may still have been tricky to get regulatory approval, though. I can’t share my sources or specifics, but I do know stories of strings being pulled and crash tests being fudged in order to get a muscle car’s new model cleared to sell.
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.
Certainly, if you look at them side by side, the new Challenger is noticeably "thicker", for whatever reason, no doubt mostly regulatory since we know how much manufacturers enjoy adding weight, especially to performance cars. But at a casual glance, it still looks more like a Challenger than not.
They'd probably have real problems with a Barracuda.
This is entirely anecdotal; but since the new Corvette was released I've noticed that I seldom see any Challengers or Chargers on the road, in driveways, or...much of anywhere for that matter. I used to see a ton of regular consumers driving Chargers a few years ago but since then they are mostly police cars, which doesn't really count. Even less so for Challengers...
But I have seen the new Corvette a ton, perhaps because it resembles a Ferrari.
I remember when dodge had an unlimited lifetime powertrain warranty during the great recession. I almost bought a v8 challenger, but gas prices scared me off.
I believe this is mostly due to declining sales. My local dealer had good stock levels during the car shortages and the sales people were complaining about lots of Chargers, but no Grand Caravans. They could sell every mini van they produced, if they could get more.
Reading the statement carefully, I don't think they'll completely stop the production of the two cars. Just the ICE versions will discontinue. They have seemed to word it like this to create fomo.
Apparently Tesla has a way of making the car sound like whatever you want. Someone got the sound got theirs to sound like a Hellcat. https://www.instagram.com/reel/CgXT5FXgNf_/
This is cool but why not just use the speakers already inside the car? The driver and passengers get the same vroom-vroom effect without irritating the rest of the world. There seems to be no good reason to go to all that trouble installing speakers facing outside the car.
It seems uniquely exhibitionist, then. All other shipping implementations of "Active Sound Design" play the artificial engine noise into the cabin only. Only this system has gone through the expense of having external speakers. It seems like the mainstream customer just cares about the car's occupants receiving the vroom-vroom sounds.
The issue is that many such drivers are anti-social, even if their intention is not necessarily to annoy people.
If they want to rev their engine and whatnot, I'm not fundamentally against it. I love me a nice-sounding engine and the visceral sensation it gives you.
But please don't do it under my window when I'm trying to work, or worse, at 2 AM when I sleep. That's just a dick move. Go out in the countryside, where the trees will cut down the noise.
Ditto for motorbikes with loud pipes. That's an absolute nuisance.
And I am, myself, a motorcyclist with a big-ass bike. I just don't rev it above 4000 RPM in the city, so it's quieter than most cars, even at the red light (the stock exhaust has a flap that closes below 5-6000 RPM).
If you understand ICE you know that's not the case though. Take all the exhaust off and you get better performance, but it's terrible for your hearing. And it is very annoying.
Some of this may be association with recent violence in addition to shifting towards greener pastures. The Challenger is a fun car to drive, but anecdotally, I know quite a few folks that can’t see one without envisioning it plowing through a crowd of protestors.
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.