Dodge Promises First-ever Muscle EV, Dusts Off Retro Logo
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.
Interested in lots of cars and their various historical contexts. Started writing articles for TTAC in late 2016, when my first posts were QOTDs. From there I started a few new series like Rare Rides, Buy/Drive/Burn, Abandoned History, and most recently Rare Rides Icons. Operating from a home base in Cincinnati, Ohio, a relative auto journalist dead zone. Many of my articles are prompted by something I'll see on social media that sparks my interest and causes me to research. Finding articles and information from the early days of the internet and beyond that covers the little details lost to time: trim packages, color and wheel choices, interior fabrics. Beyond those, I'm fascinated by automotive industry experiments, both failures and successes. Lately I've taken an interest in AI, and generating "what if" type images for car models long dead. Reincarnating a modern Toyota Paseo, Lincoln Mark IX, or Isuzu Trooper through a text prompt is fun. Fun to post them on Twitter too, and watch people overreact. To that end, the social media I use most is Twitter, @CoreyLewis86. I also contribute pieces for Forbes Wheels and Forbes Home.
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- ToolGuy I could go for a Mustang with a Subaru powertrain. (Maybe some additional ground clearance.)
- ToolGuy Does Tim Healey care about TTAC? 😉
- ToolGuy I am slashing my food budget by 1%.
- ToolGuy TG grows skeptical about his government protecting him from bad decisions.
- Calrson Fan Jeff - Agree with what you said. I think currently an EV pick-up could work in a commercial/fleet application. As someone on this site stated, w/current tech. battery vehicles just do not scale well. EBFlex - No one wanted to hate the Cyber Truck more than me but I can't ignore all the new technology and innovative thinking that went into it. There is a lot I like about it. GM, Ford & Ram should incorporate some it's design cues into their ICE trucks.
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The logo says three-phase power to me. Is "The Power of Dreams" a good slogan? F-Series is number three (3 - III - third place - second loser) in the U.S. market in second quarter of 2021; Ram is in first place. Is this because Stellantis has strong leadership now? [Or did Ford proactively execute a strategic pullback for 3D-chess-related reasons?] (Say we are picking teams - you choose Jim Farley and I'll take Carlos Tavares. Deal?)
Is this the video which is supposed to be linked above? https://youtu.be/zXOtCcWjmKI If so, the Dodge Family Home reminds me of one of my family's summer homes (the smaller and more modest one). Also, moobs.