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Daimler's abuse of the Dodge Charger legacy.
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By the way I own several Dodges from a 1960 D-500, a ' 65 Coronet 500 426, a ' 68 Charger RT, a 71 Cuda Pak ( original) and a 78 Magnum. All, except the ' 78 will EASILY smoke the new Charger, 0 to 60 or in the quarter. No, they won't equal the gas mileage, but who cares? They are my toys, not my daily transportation appliance! Which is all the new so-called Charger is, an ugly appliance! It's a shame, cause Daimler could have done it right, but they chose to pander to the morons that wear their pants down around their Knees and their caps on sidewise!
Consider the GM F-bodies (Camaro, Firebird)...these things were fire-breathing pony/muscle cars of the highest order. They were also a bargain (maybe not insurance-wise, but... ) and were relatively cheap to make. Even with all of this going for them, GM axed them. Why? Not enough people were willing to buy them.
Chrysler has to do the best it can in a very competitive marketplace. The Charger is a pretty good atttempt at balancing enthusiast concerns with the stuff that sells cars to the masses...
And don't forget, we do get the SRT-8 version soon...it'll take any of the classic Chargers in the quarter mile, and actually can brake and turn too. Surely that's worth a least a little understanding for Chrysler...
Look, old muscle has it's place, but let me tell ya' sir, I just spent a day at the Mopar drags in Milan, MI and I saw Neon SRT4s running 12.5 seconds in the quarter. On the best day a bone stock 426 hemi MIGHT get close to these numbers. Most ran high 12s/low 13s and required 100 octane to do it. The "new" muscle at the strip was just as potent as the big blocks of yore, but the folks then drove the new ones home from the track getting 25 MPG while the "real" muscle cars were put on a trailer. The styling of a car doesn't appeal to everyone. That's the way it works. Chrysler has stated for the last several years that it is their goal to have polarizing style. Without it we'd all be driving Accords. For the record, my 2006 Daytona Charger beats my 1969 Road Runner in every aspect. Yes, even 0-60 and in the quarter mile. I love the way my Charger looks and so do a lot of other folks. They did a great job on this car as virtually every car mag I've read has indicated. Also keep in mind that the new Charger gives people a car not that much short of much more expensive cars from the likes of BMW and others. Lastly, I do not wear a hat sideways, I do not wear my pants down around my knees, and I wouldn't part with my Charger for any car on the planet right now. It's really that good. Especially when considering price. So stop complaining about what is truly a great car and wait for the 2009 Challenger if all your worried about is how many doors the darned thing has.
My ' 78 Magnum is a GT with a two barrel 360 only. Has a pretty tall gear and is not a dragster, but looks good and will get 22mpg highway, even with the sad engine. One of these days............
Just to be clear. I have no doubt that new tech can get the job done. I also have no doubt that in my opinion and the opinions of most of the people i cruise with, that Chrysler blew it. Other makers have no problem selling two door cars, including Japanese and German marques! Also, the 4 door Charger that Chrysler was showing a few years ago at least looked like what a Charger should look like despite 4 doors! Hey, face it. Most car guys consider Neons, Magnums, Chargers, and so'called Chrysler 300's as high tech, but Coyote ugly! I can afford to buy whatever i want. It won't be a "Charger" in the current style!
Now then! You say I "don't get it"! Lets take a look at what I don't get. What does the new Charger have in common with the real Chargers? Not much. First, it has more in common, heritage wise, with ANY 4 door sedan from the early ' 50's on up. An old early Dodge 4 door sedan from the early ' 50's could be ordered with a real Hemi! Minus 50 + years of technology, a lot closer to the new Charger in concept! Hell, the only thing the new Charger has in common with the classics is the label. Same for the so-called new Hemi. Might be a great motor, but it is NOT a "Hemi"! Spark plugs in the middle of valve covers that shout "Hemi", do not a "Hemi" make! Hemispherical combustion chambers are what make a "Hemi" a "Hemi"! Something the new "Hemi" does NOT have!
What really ticks me off though is that for years loyal Dodge fans have BEGGED Dodge for a RWD performance car to compete with cars like the Mustang. We even begged that the Charger concept car of a few years ago would be built, 4 doors or no! Instead, Dieter and the rest of the powers that be at Daimler-Chrysler basically spit in our eye and told us, for all intents and purposes, "to hell with what YOU want, you'll buy what we decide you'll buy!" Guess what. I don't think so! Sadly, some former Dodge owners have jumped to Ford, buying Mustangs since Dodge won't give them what they want.
Seems Ford has no problem selling Mustangs. Around here, new "Chargers" are not exactly flying out the dealers doors! I have actually only seen one on the road so far. As a local Dodge Dealerships owner said: "It's a shame. It's really a great car. Too bad Dodge didn't listen to their loyal customer base"!
Oh, one thing the new Charger DOES have in common with the old ones...I think it has the same 4.5" on 5 wheel bolt pattern! :P (at least, the LH cars did and the minivans do, so I'd imagine that the LX cars do, too..)
Glad you liked the pics! That Dart has around 338,000 miles on it and is a little roughed up. Common sense is telling me to get rid of it, but when it comes to me and old cars, common sense usually doesn't win out...
had a stone white 02 Intrepid SXT that got a lot of looks because it was white.IN Arizona white's the car to have.I must say MY Charger looks better than any other color I've seen.But then again thats my opinion,just like yours.
I think you'll like it.What ever you decide good luck.
The only thing I really don't like about white is that I'm a bit tired of it, I guess. I've had my white Dart now for over 13 years. And every single car my stepdad has owned has been white. Still, I could see how white would have its advantages out in the desert! I've also pretty much sworn off grays and silvers, because I've had too many of them now. In addition to my silver Intrepid I've had a silver '89 Gran Fury copcar, a gray '85 LeSabre that my grandma gave me, and a two-tone gray over silver '86 Monte that my Mom gave me.
Xtec, a few years ago I found a 2002 Intrepid R/T at the dealer where I bought my Intrepid, and I fell in love. Once I drove it though, I hate to say it, but I wasn't THAT impressed with it. It was definitely quicker than my Trep, and better optioned out, but the more thought about it, the more I started having second thoughts. One thing I didn't like about it was that on acceleration, it almost felt like the tranny was keeping the engine from realizing its full potential. On the 2.7 it does that to a small extent, trying to upshift too quickly, but on this R/T, it also felt really slow to shift between gears. Now it did have around 35,000 miles on it, so it might have just been driven hard, but then I drove a 2005 Magnum SXT, and the tranny did the same thing. I think they've phased that 4-speed tranny out in all of the LX cars except for the 2.7 Magnum/300, so most of them these days should have the 5-speed tranny.
Another thing that made me a bit jittery was getting into that much debt again. The price on this R/T was $15,995. They had come down from around $17,995, so I guess it had been on their lot for awhile. This was in September, 2003. At first they offered me $3500 for my Trep, which had around 86,000 miles on it at the time. However, they upped that offer to what I owed on the car, which at the time was something like $4722. So that would've put me back into debt again. Another thing that bothered me is that they couldn't give me a straight answer as to the warranty on the car. Chrysler played around with their warranties some in 2002, so some models have the 3/36K bumper-to-bumper, but some have the powertrain part of that bumped out to 7/70K. If this thing had the good warranty, I would've been more tempted. Another thing that made me reconsider was that they didn't have any maintenance records for the car (supposedly the previous owner was a mechanic's wife...yeah, aren't they all? :P ) Plus, I remembered that around that mileage was when my '00 started needing a few things, like new tires (I actually wore mine out at 30K) new front brake pads (39K), the door seals started shrinking up after less than two years, and the thermostat housing started leaking a bit and was replaced around 51K, same as the rear pads. Now maybe the 3.5 had a different thermostat housing, so that might not have been an issue.
Still, thinking about it all was enough to make me just keep the car I had! And that turned out to be for the best, because now it's paid off, and November will mark my 12th month without a car payment!
Kinda reminds me of a modern version of Kowalsky's Challenger from Vanishing Point...
The only car today that qualifies as a muscle car is the NEW GTO. Mid-sized coupe, 6 liter (364cid) V8 with 400hp stuffed in. Manual or auto tranny, no wimpy base V6 models.
The V8 Mustang today is a PONY CAR, not a muscle car. although you could apply the muscle car moniker much easier to it then Charger.
The HEMI name is a joke. The so called HEMI today is NOT a real Hemi. It's marketing hype.
Muscle car or not, the new Charger is a heck of a lot better than the fwd Intrepid that is replaced.
The new GTO doesn't have a 6.0 liter V-8 "stuffed in." The 2005 GTO has more powerful brakes than the 2004 model. GM has revived rwd plans so a new GTO and/or Firebird will debut by 2009/2010.
However, in the 70's, things started to change. As the hardtop and convertible started to fade away, and opera-windowed personal luxury coupes became all the rage, not to mention skyrocketing insurance rates and plummeting hp figures, the musclecar as we knew it was on its way out. In 1973, Pontiac supplanted the GTO with the Grand Am, which was available in 2- and 4-door guise. I'd consider the Grand Am, even the 4-door version, to be a musclecar. Chevy had the Laguna S-3, which was available in 2-door, 4-door, and even a station wagon! It could be had with a pretty potent (for the time) 454-4bbl, which would put it at 0-60 in around 8 seconds, with an automatic transmission. Not bad at all considering the timeframe.
Nowadays, they just don't make 2-door family cars, so the musclecar has to be based on whatever's out there. The '94-96 Impala SS was a musclecar, and so was the recent Marauder. Okay, so the Marauder was a lame musclecar, but a musclecar nonetheless! :P
Now if you want to take the purist 1964 GM marketing definition, no, the Charger isn't a musclecar. But over time, definitions change and evolve to reflect the times. Sometimes they get watered down in the process, but that's just life. And technically, the Charger in general never was a musclecar. It started off as an attempt at a personal luxury coupe, which back in the 60's was considered sporty, as opposed to the full-blown pimpiness that evoked in the 70's. Now there were musclecar variants of the Charger, such as the R/T. But essentially it was a high-style, upscale version of the Coronet, like what a Monte Carlo was to a Chevelle. There were Chargers with 225 slant six engines, 318-2bbls, all the way up to 440 6-packs and Hemis.
It's about a man who lives in a utopian futuristic city that he believes is the last outpost of humanity after a world-wide plague. Turns out there is no plauge, and he's really a clone created as a living organ donor for rich people. Anyway, he escapes to the "real world" and tries to expose the conspiracy.
As he navigates the real world, the cops have new Charger police cars, and they look fantastic! Done in the traditional black and white, they look as cool as did the Taurus cop cars did in the original Robocop (remember how different and futuristic they looked back then in that movie?).
Looks like the Charger did VERY well! Also, looks like if you go here: http://www.michigan.gov/msp/0,1607,7-123-1645_4607_4612-16274--,00.html you can download some prelminary test results.
Despite being the fastest, the Dodge’s gained some of the top scores on braking. Both the Magnum and the Charger had the shortest stopping distance at 60 mph and the highest deceleration rate.
Who the heck would expect someone to put decent brakes on a car that goes 150mph? That is just crazy. Four wheel drum brakes would have been adequate, right?
Well, if you ask some of the Charger purists, they'd say this is just one more indication that this isn't a "real" Dodge Charger... :P
Next door they had a 60s Impala with a new Corolla as their driver. A few houses down, a nice classic Chevy truck with a '90s Civic as their driver. This seems like a sign of the times.
I doubt that many people drive real old cars on a daily basis anymore, as many of them are all fixed up and the owners are trying to preserve them now. Heck, as much as I love old cars and get all nostalgic from time to time, my '00 Intrepid still logs most of the miles. I drove a '69 Dart from 1990-1992 and a '68 from 1992-1997, and it wasn't an experience that left me emotionally scarred or anything. I wouldn't want to do it today though, partly because of the fuel prices (the '68 was a 318 that got around 13/17), and partly because of the proliferation of big SUVs these days. A Dart could handle itself well in an accident with the typical traffic of the 90's, but these days even something like a Cobalt weighs about as much as my Dart!
Well, I hadn't seen him for years, but last year I ran into him at a local show in Rockville, MD. I didn't even recgnize him, but then I hear this "you still got that DeSoto?" and it registered. Well, we got to talking about cars, and I asked him if he still had any old cars. He said no, that he was tired of them breaking down and leaking all over the driveway and leaving him stranded, so his family had nothing but Toyotas now!
Now if that isn't poetic justice, I don't know what is! :shades:
I had my grandma in the car with me, and she even commented on it. Love it or hate it, the car definitely has presence.
Another thing that I thought was cool is that the guy driving it looked to be about 3 days older than Moses. Kinda makes me think about the old advertising saying, about how you can sell an old man a young man's car, but you can't sell a young man an old man's car. It's good to see a large-ish (I have a problem calling something that's really not much longer than my '68 Dart a "large" car :P ) that can appeal to both old and young alike.
Seeing how good the Charger looks, even the total strippo edition, only makes me want one all the more. The only problem I have now is that I really had my heart set on Magnesium. Now I'm kinda torn between that and black!
And yeah, the first thing I noticed about the Charger is that the rear-end does share a resemblance to the Intrepid. But since I have an Intrepid now, I don't view that as a bad thing. And I always thought the '98-04 Intrepid had a very faint resemblance to the '68-70 Charger rear end. With the fast rear window rake and just a hint of flying buttress, and the taillight treatment that goes full-width and tapers toward the center.
I drove a copcar once...a used '89 Gran Fury police interceptor. It was a good car in just about every aspect, except that it got horrible fuel economy (around 11-13 around town, but could break 20 on the highway), tended to eat starters (lightweight little things that by that time were actually made by an outside supplier that also supplied Honda) and tended to have carb problems (which were GM Rochester QuadraFloods by that time). It wasn't too exciting to look at...had an unpretentious, utilitarian look about it, but it had decent acceleration and awesome handling.
The new Charger is also, IMO, a very comfortable car. The driving position fits me very well.
never heard that before and it does get a lot of looks more than a Acura.
Thanks for your unbiased views. It plays right into the negative stereotypes of the muscle car owner, ensuring that a portion of the car buying populace will never buy such a car for fear of being associated with such people.
Why do people think being insulting and ignorant adds to their argument?
I doubt people generally buy Acuras to get in hopes of having their choice validated by people at drive-thrus. I also doubt owners of Acura EL's are cross-shopping Chargers anyway.
As Rodney King says "Can't we all just get along?" (and have a friendly discussion about cars). I believe Rodney drove a Hyundai in the past.
Stick to the cars please. Thanks!
Lemmer, I believe a Hyundai Excel was what started the whole Rodney King thing in the first place! Supposedly he was doing around 115 mph in it when the police chased him down.
The mark of a true car guy - we have a supposedly defining moment in our nation's history, and me and Andre are trying to figure out what kind of cars are in the background.
Is this an insult against Acuras, or Canada??