Dodge is shifting (not literally, as in gears, mind you) into an entirely new era with its Charger Daytona. As the brand creeps closer to production and release of the new EV musclecar, Dodge wants fans to get excited. And so, it dropped a new clip of the car driving through a tunnel with its Fratzonic “exhaust” on display. Mopar fans are freaking out over it but it’s probably not the way Dodge hoped they would.
We’ve covered the Fratzonic exhaust in depth earlier this year. In short, it’s a series of technologies that come together to make the new all-electric Dodge Charger Daytona sound and even feel less like a battery and motors are doing the work and more like a muscle car with a combustion engine sending power to the wheels.
Frankly, the new clip showing the system roar (if we can call it that) through a tunnel isn’t even all that terrible. Does it sound like a genuine HEMI? Not really but the fact that it sort of sounds like a performance combustion engine at all is noteworthy.
Unquestionably, a lot of engineering, time, dedication, and other resources went into designing this system. It’s unique among the electric vehicles out there that offer some sort of augmented sound experience too. Does it appear as though hardcore Mopar fans care about any of that?
Nope.
These three might not even be the most brutal comments either. Others say things like “So i checked multiple times if my speaker is death [sic], even with the headphones i hear nothing???? a mowing machine is louder.” The message from fans to Dodge seems clear, this wasn’t what the market desired.
The comments are so plentiful that we could fill this entire post just with things people are saying about how unhappy they are with this clip and the direction that the manufacturer is going. Sadly for Dodge, it appears to have brought this on itself with ads that link the brand exclusively to gas-burnin’ he-man engine power, like this one:
For well over a decade, this brand has marketed itself as a fuel-swilling power-hungry muscle car maker. What other brand teamed up with stars like Vin Diesel and Bill Goldberg to promote high-horsepower low-mpg vehicles in the same way? None.
Even when Dodge finally decided to switch gears (again, not literally, you cannot have a manual transmission in a Dodge anymore) it tried to lean into the idea that muscle was still on the menu. In a lengthy ad that ended up being more awkward than inspiring, former CEO Tim Kuniskis prides his team on finding the loopholes to keep making muscle cars despite electrification.
Essentially, Dodge fed its fans years and years of counter-culture machismo only to ultimately cave to the electrification wave faster than rivals at Ford and Chevrolet.
Don’t forget that both of those other brands still make high-horsepower V8 supercars and sports cars. Will Dodge recover its reputation among die-hards or will it have to build a new position with a new reputation? There are still tens of thousands of people who liked the post, versus the people who took the time to be upset online, so perhaps there is a market. Otherwise, what’s the point of Dodge?
Save the cash and get a Vitamix blender. It will sound nicer.
Can 100% confirm this is true
Don’t forget the service contract for the muffler speaker bearings and the leaky fake sunroof.
Didn’t Doidge already enhance the exhaust sound electronically and pump fake sound into the cabin? I feel like they were already disingenuous.
It’s ultimately an interesting play at Dodge to try to pull their existing buyers along with them to electrification. It’s a big thing they all do – have a variance of products that allow you to capture buyers through their changing automotive needs. Dodge had an interesting problem in pulling their buyers along because their buyers are typically not EV buyers. Maybe even anti-EV.
I’m pretty sure that teasing this car by reminding their buyers of the one thing they love that it doesn’t have is a bad idea. There’s nothing quite like a dumb fake engine sound to remind folks that this doesn’t have a hemi.
They need to ignore the stupid noise generator and get to promoting the car based on what it will do. Line it up on drag strips and show it embarrassing other “fast” cars.
Too much noise for nothing.
If Dodge is looking to appeal to their base, they should just upload the soundtrack to basically any Clint Eastwood western—complete with Red Tailed Hawk screech
You read my mind. Buyers should be able to upload whatever they want. I would totally do what you said, in an U.S.A. flag wrapped car.
I mean, when I get around to a pure EV, I want to be able to download a Brooklyn-Italian voice actor saying, “Comin’ through here—vehicle comin’ through “ for high pedestrian-traffic occasions. 🙂
Horn is the gunshots from the For A Few Dollars More intro.
Dodge, not my company. But, this is cool and good. I like electric car sounds, but there is nothing wrong with them sounding better. I assume this can be turned off, hopefully to a default setting, for those that aren’t interested. Otherwise, appealing to all the senses in a way that cars have always done, is a good thing, and great to see Dodge embracing it.
Is it dumb?
Absolutely.
Are they at least trying?
…yes. EVs are inherently less engaging than ICE vehicles and naturally don’t offer the same kind of visceral auditory experience muscle car fans enjoy. I’m not into this personally, but we’re at the stage with EVs when we need to be trying a bunch of different stuff to see what sticks.
Everyone (including me) shat on all the theatrics that Hyundai put in the Ioniq 5 N but they’ve received pretty much unanimous praise from every journalist who’s reviewed the car. That being said…I wish they’d put all the resources they put into this into making the damn thing weigh less than 6,000 pounds….
This is a gimmick, and it’s generating a lot of press around it..
Now Dodge, show me one with this new turbo 6, slightly warmed over, laying down some rubber with screaming tires and boost noises..
I’m not the only one who thinks complaining about the sound is kind of immature? The car visually looks so much better than the last models, which I already liked, so I’d hate to see it do badly because people can’t handle a change in the noise.
Nah, the only immature thing is expecting people to keep their mouths shut when they were specifically asked if they heard that in the context of the tweet. Don’t ask people for their opinion if you can’t handle the negative ones.
But… it doesn’t even sound bad in the video. How many people actually hate the sound versus just looking for an excuse to complain about the powertrain change?
Why are you narrowing it down to just how it sounds? Big picture, an electric car pumping out a V8 sound via a speaker, is dumb. That’s the complaint. The complaint isn’t that it sounds bad.
I like EVs. I like V8s. I don’t like EVs that pump out a V8 sound via a speaker.
Now, if they had made it make a sound via straight cut gears or something like that, I’d probably be ok with it, like Harley did with the LiveWire. But a speaker is dumb, just like it was with VW’s Soundaktor.
I guess it’s just such a small thing I can’t make myself care. Plus I’ve read that the car lets you turn the thing off anyway. So the people who want the sound can have it, and the people with hangups about the sound can turn it off and enjoy the car regardless.
Sir we are here to COMPLAIN and be VERY MAD. Get out of here with that nonchalant attitude. The mere knowledge of this existing is too much to bear!
If it was software through the standard sound system, I’d agree, but this is a pretty large piece of hardware, paired with another heavy piece of hardware designed to vibrate the whole chassis.
After turning it off, you’re still carrying around dead weight and paying for the material cost of it.. There are real, tangible drawbacks involved in this system. I know it’s in a heavy car, but every ounce matters in EV’s.
A few pounds of dead weight necessitates a few ounces of brackets, bolts, wires and plugs to mount/run, a few dozen dollars to produce, and the sum of all that takes a few kWh to carry around. As of today, kWh are both heavy and expensive, and need to carry themselves. That means battery size and weight have to be increased, and at THAT point you’re also beefing up suspension and chassis to deal with the heavier unit.
At the end of the day, you’ve added much more than the price and weight of the fratzonic system to the vehicle, just so someone could turn it off. It’s probably not that big a deal on someone’s car payment, but as an engineer, it’s an abomination.
If the comments in the article were half as good as this one I wouldn’t have called them immature, at least there’s actual reasons here other than just “it’s embarrassing that it’s not a V8!!”
I’m flattered, and I do agree that most of the Twitter comments are just shallow attempts at “wit” just as fake as the exhaust sound itself. It’s just a bunch of zingers without any real substance.
I, for one, am unhappy that Dodge fitted an EV with technology specifically designed to bother other people. In an ICE vehicle, noise is the necessary by-product of power, but here it’s a completely unnecessary addition.
It’s not that it’s the “wrong” noise, the problem is that there’s no excuse to make other people hear the car at all. I’m opposed to this thing for the same reason that I’d be against building a house with a Dolby surround sound system pointed at the front yard, or headphones with outward-facing subwoofers. I don’t care if it enhances “depth of field” or “authenticity”, it’s anti-social and asinine.
“I’m not the only one who thinks complaining about the sound is kind of immature?”
The vehicle itself is about immaturity (whether ICE or EV), so it’s unsurprising that the complaints are immature. The market is people trying to relive being a nineteen year old idiot in 1968, who don’t realize that they’re already halfway there because they’re still an idiot. As evidenced by the fact that all they do with it is either annoy their neighbors with exhaust noise once a week when they actually take it out while buying milk in order to keep the brakes from rusting, and blast and then brake from stop sign to stop sign, or sell it after realizing that blasting down the still-not-empty highway at 1 AM at dangerous speeds isn’t as fun as they thought it would be. Those are the use cases for the ones that have been in my neighborhood.
I’ve been watching Formula E the last few years and at first the sound was kind of off-putting but now I don’t really think about it much. You still can hear the cars on and off throttle, it’s just a different sound and not what your brain expects to hear from a race car at first.
The point being is that a high performance EV does make its own unique sound, and if anyone at Dodge is serious about turning this page, then the thing to do is let the EV sound be its own thing and just lean into that. Eventually it will just be the thing that car does.
Trying to make it be something it’s not is a fool’s errand, especially when they’re going to be selling a gasoline I6 version concurrently.
I was hoping that EVs were going to make it so I wouldn’t ever have to hear another Dodge Charger/Challenger with a nobnoxious exhaust ever again, but alas…
Whole heartedly, I hope Dodge succeeds in this. Complain all you want, but this is at least them trying.
I think this is where I’m at with this too.
The execution may not be perfect, but the idea comes from a good place.
Just make it play the opening riff to Slayer’s “Reign in Blood” on repeat. You step on the gas and the boom-boom dun-dun-dun starts. Everyone will love it!
I was thinking that or Maiden’s Wasted Years.
C’mon, man! It’s an EV. Runs on electricity. AC/DC.
The obvious choice is Bon Scott’s bagpipes from “It’s a Long Way to the Top”!
This is perfect.
Nah man, if you’re going with AC/DC, go with Thunderstruck.
Personally, I would go with Kickstart My Heart from Motley Crue…
Sorry. Thunderstruck is reserved for Ford’s performance version of the Lightning – ThunderTruck!
However, an argument can be made for “High Voltage”.
Was this a good idea, needed, or wanted by anyone? I don’t think so. All it’s doing is adding fuel to the fire for the unbearable “MY CAR NEES TO CONSUME DEAD DINOSAURS AND BREATH FIRE” crowd that comments “HAHAHA ENERGIZER CAR” on every EV post on Facebook.
This is the automotive equivalent to Milli Vanilli. Just say no to Fartsonic exhaust.
Just as limp synching became popularly accepted (admittedly, by the actual singers) as did Autotune, so shall this. Unfortunately, far too late for an apology to Milli or Vanilli (whichever one it was who took their own life) from all those people who loved the music until they pretended they were too cool to listen to a limp-syncher, but that’s getting too far off track (who everyone should have been mad at was the record company who thought the real singers weren’t aesthetically marketable enough that they needed a different face to front the sound and maybe they should be mad at themselves for caring so much about what artists working in an audio medium look like that a record company felt it needed to do this in the first place).
Their mistake was attempting to emulate a V8 muscle car. Large industrial electric motors can be powerful and fearsome. Why not emulate that, or even just amplify the natural sound of the Chargers own motors.
If you remove the interior of a Tesla the motors and inverters are shockingly loud in a racey direct-drive sort of way.
I mean, they have a point? Car enthusiasts hate fake engine noise. Doesn’t matter if it’s being pumped in, pumped out.
A muscle car specifically is supposed to be a raw driving experience.
Fake is never good. That goes for everything, including bodily “enhancement”.
What does “fake” even mean? Are bean burgers bad? Cartoons? Pretending the floor is lava? Synthesized medicines? Nylon?
People are rejecting the sound this car makes because it doesn’t sound like cars did in their youth/early adulthood. That’s human nature but it’s not rational.
Fake is spending effort to make something look or sound like something that it is not. It is an EV. Let it sound like one.
The whole point of an EV is efficiency. Expending energy to annoy your neighbors just loses the plot.
This. It’s one thing to have interior speakers for funny simulated engine noises, that’s just software that weighs nothing and costs nothing beyond development. But an external organ to play noises for everyone around is a waste of space, money and energy.
You’ve hit on the part that’s the most questionable to me – that other people who had no say have to be subjected to it.
It’s one thing with when external noise was a necessary by-product of a vehicle’s operation, but another thing entirely when it’s being purposefully added in to an otherwise nearly quiet vehicle.
I’m no absolutist – my Mustang is reasonably-to-me-but-maybe-not-others growly – but I do think there’s what economists call a question of externalities here that’s being almost completely sidestepped by Dodge.
“I don’t like EV’s because I want Vroom-Vroom noises”
“OK – here’s an EV that makes some pretty convincing Vroom-Vroom noises”
“No – I don’t want those Vroom-Vroom noises, I want REAL Vroom-Vroom noises”
I gotta wonder – Do these people refuse to listen to music when they’re not at a concert because it’s recorded and therefore “not real”?
I get your point, but people would absolutely rather go to a live show if they were paying $85,000+, and moreover, driving an obnoxious car is like playing music poorly, not listening to it – nobody wants to press a button that hits play on a recording of a novice playing the Smoke On The Water riff for an hour, everyone agrees that’s bad and nobody wants to listen to it or sit there and hold that button. But many people are happy to pick up a guitar and play a shitty rendition of the riff for hours, because it’s fun and they’re doing it, and maybe getting slowly better while they’re there.
I would neve sit and listen to a playback of my own guitar practice for aural enjoyment, because I suck, and when I practice, I’m doing the same riff over and over. So does every engine in traffic. Engine noises are only fun when you’re making them yourself with your own engine or watching someone else PERFORM (i.e. racing).
Likewise, I don’t sit at work and play engine noises on my headphones, I listen to music. But on my drive home, I put the top down and drop a few gears so I can hear the physical noises of the physical thing behind me, waveforms that I generate with my own feet, for fun.
That said, I don’t complain that EV’s are quiet, but the people that do, don’t want them at all, and making a noisy EV is just pissing in a forest fire.
Sounds like $86,000 to me.
Reminds me of the uproar when Porsche switched to water cooled engines.
And here we are, 25 some years later, and I barely hear this complaint about 911s.
It reminds me more of when Ford called their CUV a Mustang.
I do still hear that complaint.
That was also like 4 years ago, not 25.
I could see HD doing this in the future, just to keep their fans happy with loud exhaust
This is dumb. Not the complaining, because those people are right. Fake sounds for the sake of trying to re-create something that was lost, is dumb. This isn’t akin to trying to make electronic steering feel more natural, or anything like that. This is fake dumb shit.
Just let it sound like it normally sounds, which would be eerily quiet. Maybe add some sound if it’s required for safety, but otherwise no fake shit.
I made the same complaints when VW stuck the soundaktor in the GTI. It’s a dumb gimmick.
Not only dumb but appeals to neither current Dodge owners or EV buyers. Who is this for?
Some weird Venn diagram of …
Don’t forget 5. Is willing and able to spend $60k-$80K on a Dodge
The funny thing is, this isn’t the first scenario where a brand had a major part of its identity wrapped up in the noise, which was lost as they released electric models. Look at Harley Davidson with the LiveWire. They made it make sound, but they did it far more organically by using straight cut bevel gears on the output shaft to the main drive belt, and tweaking the profile of the gears.
This is just a case of a dumb idea. I can see why they think it’s a good one, but it ain’t.
I put this in the same group of ideas as Triumph making their Modern Classics look like they are air cooled, and having fake looking carbs to hide they are fuel injected. The difference is that Triumphs ideas were good.
IDK, people have been making their vehicles louder for no reason other than making their vehicles louder for ages. It’s not really a whole lot different.
Using a speaker is a lot different.
They should make it sound like a Jetsons car.
Totally. That’s what it is, after all. I just hope there’s another sound mode that can offer that.
Hackers: We can add any sound you want for your new Dodge
I wish I could change our MachE sound to the jetsons car.
That’s exactly the direction all the EVs should go in. Maybe not The Jetsons, but it is so silly to try and emulate the one sound everyone knows it’s not. Instead of making a poseur noise, there are a virtually unlimited choice of noises to emit.
Like, make it go “pew,pew,pew”, or sound like a light saber, or sound like an F-16. Anything anyone wants it to sound like. The whole idea of simulated noise is basically just ringtones for a car. Shit, you can have it make different sounds based on acceleration/deceleration/turning.
Gimme the Cha Cha Slide, for instance.:
To the left
Take it back now y’all
One hop this time
Right foot. Let’s stomp
Left foot. Let’s stomp
Cha cha real smooth