Motor Mouth: Why Dodge’s decision to electrify its Mopar Muscle cars is absolutely brilliant

Article content

If you’re a fan of muscle cars, especially Mopar Muscle cars, the end would appear to be truly nigh. Long the leader — some would say ring-leader — of the genre, Dodge has announced that the long-running rebirth of its Challenger and Charger is coming to an end. According to this week’s announcement from Stellantis, after 2023’s “last call,” there will be no more superchargers, no more Hemis, and, most disturbing to we fans of plugs and pistons, nary an intemperate big-block V8 to be found. Their internally combusted mayhem — and how else do you describe 800+ horsepower of supercharged V8 on a chassis that owes much of its lineage to Chrysler’s not especially sporty 300 sedan — will again, as it did in the ‘60s and early ‘70s, become a novelty for history books. Like muscle cars past, the Demon and Hellcat are once again the victims of fuel consumption and tailpipe emissions.

Article content

Naturally, the traditionalists are up in arms. Not only are their beloved Challengers and Chargers to be scuttled, but — and surely this is the very definition of blasphemy — Dodge plans to electrify their replacements. To hear the old and oil-stained tell it, it really is the end of days.

Except it isn’t. Not hardly at all. If anything, electrification is likely to be the saving of the muscle car. In fact, I’ll go even further, there is no single class of automobile — nor any brand more than Dodge — more perfectly suited to electrification.

Not buying that, are you? Well let’s see if I can lay it out for you.

Forget the Nissan Leafs, BMW i3s, and Chevy Bolts that have been the cannon-fodder of our electrification dreams. The electric vehicles that garner all our attention — certainly the ones that garner all the “above the fold,” 48-point headlines — have for two things in common: they are massively overpowered, and they have huge batteries. In North America, 70 kilowatt-hours is considered barely adequate. And we’ve blown past the 100-kWh mark so fast it makes the head spin. Since every one of those kilowatt-hour things weighs about 5 or 6 kilograms, that means the lightest of these batteries weigh close to 400 kilograms. Even factoring the loss of internal combustion engine and the requisite transmission, the recent spate of 100+ kWh Teslas, Hummers, and BMWs are typically at least 1,000 pounds heavier than their ICE equivalents.

Article content

This means most of them handle like shit. Oh, stiff suspension helps alleviate some of the BMW iX M60’s avoirdupois. And yes, the Porsche Taycan turns a dream until all that weight wears out Pirelli PZeros. But generally, the monster-motored EVs we North Americans seem to love so are not nearly as lithe as their ICE equivalents.

But they are powerful. Oh, are they powerful. Tesla as fast as Ferraris, e-Trons with more torque than turbodiesels, and Genesises with “Boost” buttons. Even lowly Ford SUVs boast monstrous horsepower if their source of energy is lithium and its ions. If there’s anything common to every EV sold in North America — even some of those budget models I mentioned before — it’s that their straight-line acceleration belies the fact that their prime attraction is supposed to be saving the planet from deadly greenhouse gases.

Article content

Sum this all up, and as far as I can see, typical EVs are fat, ill-handling, over-wrought muscle cars, tire-twisting torque their main attraction. Which, if you’ll remember the main thesis of my splashy headline, pretty much describes every SRT Challenger or Charger ever sold. Hell, they’re both similarly useless on the highway. If engineering be the art of matching technology to need, there has never been an automotive segment so perfectly attuned to electrification than the North American muscle car and no brand more primed for a BEV’s over-wrought torque than Dodge SRT.

There will be challenges, however. On the micro scale, even SRT Dodges have a Tesla problem. The best of Silicon Valley — the improbably-named Plaid Model S — is good for some 1,020 horsepower and a 9.4 second quarter mile. Compare that with the Challenger SRT Super Stock, which fairly looks like the equivalent of the drag racing class it’s named after but only manages, according to Motor Trend, a 10.5-second sprint. As for the first of these electrified SRT muscle cars, the Charger Daytona Banshee will be, according to Stellantis, as fast as the current Hellcat, which — oh, my God, how slow can you get — means a quarter mile somewhere in the region of 11.9 second quarter at 126 miles per hour. That Tesla Plaid I mentioned earlier tops the quarter at 151 mph. In other words, to credibly call its new EVs Mopar Muscle, Dodge is going to need some serious moxie — I’d guess 1,250 or more horsepower — if they’re to be accepted as true Hellcats and Demons.

Article content

And that raises a problem of a Macro scale. In all likelihood, all of these electrified Mopars are going to be just as costly — if not more so — than the fossil-fueled “Last Calls” soon to be hurrying out Dodge dealership doors. Like so North American battery-powered offerings, Stellantis’ first effort at domestic electric is aimed at the upper echelon of the automobile market. Even the Charger Daytona Banshee, if it ever gets produced, is going to be a lot closer to $100,000 than it will be to 50-large.

What makes this all so ironic is that Stellantis Europe just took second place in overall battery-electric vehicle sales, passing, believe it or not, mighty Tesla. Only Volkswagen sells more BEVS in the EU and even then, despite all the hype surrounding VW and electrification, not by much. That success is largely on the back of cost-conscious cars like the Fiat 500 EV and Peugeot’s similarly diminutive e-208. Both, as you might surmise, are entry-level runabouts whose entire MSRP would barely pay for the battery in one of the SRT’s upcoming hot-rods.

Doubling the irony is that no less than Stellantis’ chief manufacturing officer in Europe, Arnaud Deboeuf, recently told Bloomberg that electric cars are still too expensive to produce, just last month noting that, “If EVs don’t get cheaper, the market will collapse.” According to Deboeuf, even in the EU — where electrics already own more than 20 per cent of overall sales — BEVs need to cost 40 per cent less to manufacture if plug-ins are truly to take over from ICEs.

 So yes, Dodge’s plan to electrify all its muscle cars is brilliant. But it doesn’t solve anything.