Stellantis made many announcements yesterday at its “EV Day 2021” event, first and foremost a big commitment to EVs going forward. The second most important thing involved the super cringe slogans for each brand.
But there was also a Dodge-specific announcement, which promised the first-ever EV muscle car, and the resurrection of a long-dead logo.
Fitting the brand’s new, awful slogan “Tear Up the Streets… Not the Planet,” Dodge plans to introduce a new muscle EV in 2024. Making the announcement in a video just slightly less cringe than its new slogan, brand lead Tim Kuniskis gives some vague details about the future of the muscle EV that will become the brand’s direction. The video is presented on-location at the Dodge estate with a bunch of historic Dodge vehicles, some of which are still in production.
“Embracing the brand’s history while looking to the future,” Dodge knows muscle cars. A food pyramid made of Dodge-type things really reflects something or other about American flags and tattooed fingers? “Excess drives success,” it says, which seems the thing that caused us to need EVs in the first place, but maybe that’s just me.
Dodge will not sell electric cars, but it will sell American eMuscle. The “eMuscle” is written but not spoken when Tim reads the slide. Dodge customers are buying an experience, not technology – though it would seem the latter begets the former, lest there be no former. With this new branding and eMuscle, Dodge is going after the Millennials, who are either the poorest and least-motivated consumer group, or the group that’s the most motivated with the highest spending power, depending upon who you ask.
With the new EV muscle direction, the Dodge brand seeks to provide more horsepower than ever before, as its customers want. The video states electric motivation has now eclipsed the internal combustion engine, as that technology has reached its peak. For its all-new eMuscle car direction, Dodge is dusting off an old logo: the Fratzog. Dodge used the rocket-esque three-spoke design from 1962 to 1976. Its name was a made-up word by Fratzog’s designer, as Dodge forced him to name the creation. It was the last logo before Dodge went logo-free for a while, and then adopted the Chrysler Pentastar logo in 1982. Notably, the Fratzog was out of use a good five to seven years before the earliest Millennials were ever born.
Come 2024, it’ll be interesting to see how Challenger-esque this new EV is. From the scant views given in the video, it seems all the traditional Dodge Challenger shapes are there. It’s definitely all-wheel drive, per the tire smoke at the end. With stricter emissions regulations a certainty of the future, it’s best Dodge plans an EV transition now. They can only sell those Bush-era V8s for so long.
[Images: Stellantis via YouTube]
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