As a muscle car driver in the past, oddly, the sound is a big deal. The sound scratches some primal itch. A muscle car sounds like mechanical power. It’s hard to explain, it vibrates through the pedal, so I guess it’s sort of a human-machine interface feature. But also emotional. A lot going on there, I actually find that dimension of the design real interesting, most potential buyers hate what they attempted.

I can see how the corporate suits and engineers wouldn’t get it. But surely at least some of their engineers are gearheads? They tried to replicate it, and just widely missed the mark to most folks. It sounds really shitty in the videos I’ve seen.

You’re right, tho, the simple answer… it’s fake. It’s much more expensive than it used to be, and it’s clearly imitation. Nobody likes being a sucker, and a bad deal like that makes the buyer a sucker.

Greater than the sum of their parts, love it.

Whether it is a feature or a bug depends on how their sales numbers look for Q1 2025.

Call it Schroedinger’s bug.

The Muse’s cleavage knows what’s up.

Yeah, that’s how I read it :)

… Thanks for the downvote, boss XD

Have a great day.

This is the company that saw their North American sales dipping and responded, “let’s discontinue the Challenger and Charger, our 2 recognizable nameplates that give the rest of our lineup a halo effect with our largest buying segment, that’ll fix it!”

Then they brought back the Charger as an EV, which is exactly what that particular fanbase did not want to buy, at a starting price that’ll make your eyes water. Now they’ve announced that they’re doubling back and releasing a gasoline Charger, but by surprise and with no specs available in advance, as though they’re panic-releasing it. It’s a perfect shit show. Corporate idiocy on parade.

The folk with the random alphanumeric username, asking the real questions

Is your Challenger using the dealer installed SiriusXM? That would be for new and CPO vehicles. That seems to be what it is linked to.

Y’all are… surprisingly hard to persuade! I thought sharing a literal image of popup ads in the car would be the proof y’all needed to believe it was happening.

I mean, there are… more images of it happening…? Like, damn. Here’s an instance of it happening in a Challenger.

Reported by drivers as recently as Tuesday.

One of dozens of such reports, confirming make, model, and frequency of the ads (at every stop): https://www.reddit.com/r/Dodge/comments/1j838k8/why_tf_am_i_getting_ads_in_my_car/

I’m the world’s worst journalist, but I do try! When possible, I confirm facts with multiple sources. The “news” aspect here is that they were previously on a different Stellantis brand (Jeep), and now they have expanded to another Stellantis brand (Dodge).

If you have evidence that contradicts, feel free to share.

DON’T GIVE THEM IDEAS!

4 months is “almost” half a year, I guess.

Point of the post is that this popup ad thing has expanded from Jeep (small brand) into Dodge (large brand) from the parent company (Stellantis). What has happened in the meantime is that a bunch of other Dodge drivers has confirmed the issue is widespread and difficult to disable.

(Ope: I got fact-checked, turns out Jeep sells more vehicles per year than Dodge. I’m old, and apparently Dodge has lost a ton of market share since last I checked!

If y’all are concerned about recency, I updated the article to include more images of the popup ads, including one from as recently as 3 days ago.)

Dodge dropped 29% in sales in the USA last year, and something tells me, this isn’t going to have folks lining up to buy Chargers in 2025. Watch the free market* take care of this one.

*Unless you’re Tesla, in which case the market costs $277 million to purchase.

I can’t say that it is certainly fraud.

… But I can certainly say that Tesla has historically never come close to registering that sort of single weekend sales performance while taking advantage of the iZEV program in Canada :)

For some reason, their most lucrative rebate performance came after Elon’s controversial backing of a US president who, among other things, is calling for the annexation of Canada under the threat of economic (and maybe military?) ramifications.

How about that! You would think that would be really unpopular to be associated with, seeing as how Canadians have a proudly independent streak. It’s causing ~50-75% drops in sales in politically-similar NATO states. Then, just in Canada, that talk apparently coincided with huge sales gains, and just as the EV rebate program was due to run out of funds. Strange!

These next few weeks are going to be really interesting as the Canadian Transportation Minister confirms the details on that rebate program, like she has stated she intends to.

I hear you! That’s very interesting to know about RFP, that term is 100% new to me. Makes a lot of sense.

Point taken. Article amended with a thank you for your more specific terminology.

Have a good one.

Edit: I should have lead with… thanks! I appreciate a second set of eyes on it, I want everything in my articles to be factually correct. If ever I’m way off in content I share, please do tell me, and I’ll correct it.

Tell you what, to avoid confusion, I’ll simplify the language in that paragraph, it seems to be distracting a few folks.

I should mention, my experience is very old, I haven’t held a valid cert in decades - so, if there is a flaw in my knowledge, that wouldn’t be my old LT’s fault (as our training was broadly excellent), that is almost certainly foggy memory.

In this case, I’m still pretty sure I’ve described the behavior correctly. I’m removing the reference to avoid distraction, but I’m pretty sure it is correct as-is. See bolded text if you only want to read a single sentence about it.

The definitions you’ve linked above do not contradict what I’ve posted below or how I’ve described the behavior in the article. You’re running a narrow definition, I’m running a broad definition, the distinction is really fine and neither is wrong.

From the linked Wikipedia article I linked above:

This definition [of flashover] embraces several different scenarios and includes backdrafts, but there is considerable disagreement about categorizing backdrafts as flashovers.[5]

A retired firefighter mentioned that her department was using something very interesting - these are flood control barricades, think plastic sandbags.

You put up the barricades, and then use that to make a sort of moat, fill it with water, and you basically build the water tank around the burning EV.

This page shows the concept, site’s in India, but this is being done in the western hemisphere some places, too: https://www.floodbarriers.in/ev_fire_fighting.php

Ya know, we actually don’t use fire blankets where I’m at! The training videogame also made no mention of them, and it is very recent, released last year.

Interesting, right? There’s a huge amount of variation for firefighting techniques nationwide for EVs. I’ve seen them used, but only out West.

As for confusing backdraft and flashover, no, I got that correct. To the best of my admittedly very spotty memory :)

See this article, it means different things different places, how I learned it is that every backdraft is a flashover, but not every flashover is a backdraft. If that’s wrong, take it up with the lieutenant who trained me, who was incidentally stellar at his job: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Backdraft

Me looking at Mozilla like: https://pbs.twimg.com/media/GHShUPtagAANgks.jpg

deleted by creator