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.