Celebrating a Death
https://www.ericpetersautos.com/2022/08/16/celebrating-a-death/
By eric - August 16, 2022
How does one “celebrate” a death?
It’s an odd choice of words given the death is more like a murder – the unnatural ending of the lives of the Dodge Charger and Challenger, which should have been around for many years to come but won’t be around after the end of next year – courtesy of the Things in Washington that signed their death warrants.
They will be replaced by more “eco-friendly” electric cars – air-fingers-quotation marks to emphasize the lie of the thing, since there is nothing “eco friendly” about replacing a 500 pound V8 engine – as in the Charger and Challenger – with a 1,000-plus pounds of environmentally hazardous materials that consume a gratuitously excessive amount of power – in the form electricity that is generated almost entirely by burning hydrocarbon fuels, just like a V8 engine.
The only thing “eco” about these electric cars is the fraudulent sales pitch.
Here it is worth a mention that VW got Hut! Hut! Hutted! by the federal government for marketing what were styled “clean” diesels – because they produced fractionally more oxides of nitrogen, a byproduct of combustion, under full throttle – and because VW installed “cheat” software that caused this fractional difference in NOx emissions to pass unnoticed on federal emissions certification tests.
Now, these VW diesels were “clean” – in that they burned very little fuel per mile (most were capable of going more than 50 miles on a gallon of fuel) and that alone reduced the quantity of gasses they “emitted” substantially.
Being diesels, their engines would go 200,000-plus miles before needing to be replaced – as opposed to replacing the EV’s 1,000-plus pound battery pack at least once by then.
VW’s diesels were far more “eco-friendly” than electric cars that require 1,000-plus pounds of environmentally toxic materials to store a massive amount of electricity that must be regularly replenished via the energy-intensive combustion of hydrocarbon fuels that – when burned – results in more gasses being produced. The same gasses allegedly responsible for the “climate change” these Things assert must be averted by killing off V8-powered cars like the Dodge Charger and Challenger. And not just them, either. The Chrysler 300 is closely related to the Charger; if the Charger goes, so does Chrysler probably.
It is idiocy and outrage combined.
And it may well result in the ending of Dodge, too – as Dodge without the Charger and Challenger in the lineup is a car company with only one other model left in its lineup, that one being the Durango SUV. Which is also expected to walk the Green Mile, for it is also powered by the same V8 that Dodge can no longer offer in the Charger and Challenger.
Well, there may still be Dodges called Chargers and Challengers after 2023 – but without the V8s (and with battery-electric propulsion) they become something in-name-only. Something the same as every other “electrified” everything else. How many of the same thing can the market support?
Dodge sold more than 3 million Challengers and Chargers because the people who bought them wanted something different.
And different they were.
Uniquely in the modern era, these big bruisers offered big V8s, the kind of powerplant that once defined American cars – and which most Americans could afford, once-upon-a-better-time.
Three-plus million people did not buy these cars because they were “eco friendly” – but because they were a Bruce Lee thorax punch to that cloying bullshit, even though they weren’t bad for the “environment,” either. See that point made earlier about the 500 pound V8 vs. the 1,000-plus pounds of earth-raped materials and keeping the big brick powered up. Not to mention the much shorter operational lifespan of the 1,000-plus pounds of earth-raped materials that will have to be replaced – more earth rape, as for example endless fields of earth-ruinous brine leaching to extract lithium – years before a V8 reaches its functional dotage (usually 12-15 years and often much longer with decent treatment).
Without those V8s – no matter how powerful their “electrified” replacements turn out to be – they will just be another iteration of the same thing.
Dodge is being forced, in other words, to kill off the thing that made the brand desirable to those who bought the cars – in order to appease the sanctimony of those who hate cars and will cackle over Dodge’s open grave like Hillary when she heard about what her minions had done to Muammar Quadaffi.
So light a candle.
Before the last Charger or Challenger rolls off the assembly line in Brampton (in Ontario, Canada) Dodge will “celebrate” their end by embossing each 2023 model with a Last Call plaque and by resurrecting, for one last time, colors such as Sublime and Plum Crazy. V8 models will also carry special “345” badges – to reflect cubic inches, not liters – as American cars once proudly boasted.
In the future, it will be kilowatt-hours . . . just like your microwave.
The ultimate Last Call model will be the Jailbreak Edition – which packages the supercharged, 807 horsepower Hemi V8 with Wide-Body flared fenders, sidepipe exhaust and the classic color schemes, too.
“Three million cars, a billion horsepower and a lot of really happy customers that helped build our brand,” says Dodge CEO Tim Kuniskis. “We’re going to make sure that we do that (he means, the funeral) right.”
Mourn for what was – and which didn’t have to go. Courtesy of the Things that are responsible for making them go.
God damn them every one of them.
