Never Lift<\/a><\/strong>\u2019 business plan last year, we said it’s going to be a two-year transition. And when we launched, I said this is going to seem very schizophrenic at first; the further we get into it, it’s going to get clearer and more focused. This week is really the biggest step towards getting it more focused. Here’s everything that they’re going to do to not go away quietly, and really celebrate everything that’s happened over the last decade to build this brand into what it is. I can’t let it go without a celebration. So yeah, we’re throwing the kitchen sink at the current in-market cars, which is what our customers are expecting from us.<\/p>\n\n\n\nBut hidden in there are really quiet steps in the transition toward the future. The first one is Hornet. We have a gas one and we have a PHEV one. For that segment, it’s powerful, it’s fast, it’s gas, it’s all-wheel drive, it’s got a great suspension, it’s got 20s, it’s got Brembos. It’s everything expected from Dodge, and it’s everything different than everything else in the segment. But what’s going to happen is, people are going to start learning about the PHEV and they\u2019ll go, “wait a minute, the PHEV has actually got more performance; that\u2019s actually the better one, I want that one.” And that’s going to be the start of the tip of people going, “Hey, there’s something here.”<\/p>\n\n\n\n
TDB: <\/strong>The Hornet\u2019s styling doesn’t seem quite as aggressive as might be expected from Dodge. Are you looking for a more diverse mix of customers?<\/p>\n\n\n\nTim Kuniskis, Dodge Brand CEO, reveals the new 2023 Dodge Hornet during Dodge Speed Week at M1 Concourse in Pontiac, Michigan.<\/figcaption><\/figure><\/div>\n\n\n\nTK: <\/strong>Well, if you look at the basis of the car, we probably could have changed it some more. Like on the Hornet GLH, we could have put a more aggressive spoiler on the back. And maybe we will; this is our first step out. We have a tendency to have fairly long life cycles. But we think the way the car looks, compared to everything else in the segment is really muscular and cool looking. Now, if you put the car up and try and compare it to a Demon or something like that, OK, it doesn’t look like it’s going to eat me the way a Demon does. But in the context of its segment, this is definitely an outlier.<\/p>\n\n\n\nTDB: <\/strong>Do you think there’ll be resistance among your diehard customers who are celebrating this year\u2019s models? Is it going take longer for them to accept the Charger Daytona and its electric driveline?<\/p>\n\n\n\nTK:\u00a0<\/strong>Yes, no question. It takes soak time. We spent a decade training them on how we do this. We can’t wake up and say, “you know, we changed gears come along with us.” So that whole two years of transition is designed to get people comfortable with how we’re doing it, why we’re doing it and why it’s actually going to not be an electrified product, but why it’s going to make what they know today. We’re never going to sell an electric car; never. We’re going to sell a muscle car that also happens to be electrified.<\/p>\n\n\n\nTDB: <\/strong>Are you going to be doing a dual powertrain strategy for the Charger Daytona?<\/p>\n\n\n\nTim Kuniskis unveils the Dodge Charger Daytona SRT Concept, a battery-electric performance vehicle powered by a new 800V Banshee propulsion system and the industry’s EV exhaust system.<\/figcaption><\/figure><\/div>\n\n\n\nTK:<\/strong>\u00a0The only thing we’re doing for the concept is full battery electric. As a matter of fact, we’re not showing you the full powertrain line-up. Like we always do, we’re showing you the 800-volt SRT Banshee top of the line. Here’s the craziest one that we’re going to do, here’s the pinnacle, and some of this stuff is going to trickle down and it’s going to still give me that cool lineage and cool DNA all the way through the line-up.<\/p>\n\n\n\nPeople always ask me, “hey, are you going to put gas in the car?” You know, it takes many, many, many years to do this. We’re launching a battery-electric Charger Daytona because that is the future. That’s tons of money and a lot of years to try and redevelop the car to go that direction. It doesn’t mean you can’t do it; it’s just it’s just time and money to be able to accomplish it.<\/p>\n\n\n\n
TDB:<\/strong>\u00a0And given the life cycle going forward to that product with a gas engine, why spend the money?<\/p>\n\n\n\nTK:<\/strong> Exactly. If you look at the compliance fines that I paid today, customers would not want to see how much of their hard-earned money is going to fines.<\/p>\n\n\n\nTDB: <\/strong>Having talked to your customers and read their blogs, how big is the resistance to an all-electric Dodge?<\/p>\n\n\n\nTK: <\/strong>We have the youngest demographic in the industry. So what’s interesting is if you look at the demographic profile of EV acceptance, I don’t think it’s hard to figure out that the youngest buyers are the most open to EVs. So if you have the youngest demographic in the industry, and the youngest people are the most open to EVs, that puts you in a good position.<\/p>\n\n\n\nNow, that’s half of the truth. The other truth is, yeah, they’re the youngest buyer, but they’re coming here for a reason. They’re coming here for the attitude, the personality, the performance, and all of the other things that I offer. So you can’t just give them an electric car. You\u2019ve got to give them an electric car that fits in the personality and a positioning of the brand. If you can combine those two, we think our chances are pretty good.<\/p>\n\n\n\n
TDB: <\/strong>Can you talk about the Charger Daytona?<\/p>\n\n\n\nThe future of electrified muscle: Dodge Charger Daytona SRT Concept<\/figcaption><\/figure><\/div>\n\n\n\nTK:\u00a0<\/strong>We said, “look, the only way we’re bringing a Dodge EV to market as it hits these three buttons: it’s got to look like a Dodge, sounds like a Dodge and drive like a Dodge.”<\/p>\n\n\n\nSo the first one looks like a Dodge. If you look at a silhouette of every electric car built today, they all look like melted jelly beans; the aero signature of them is very familiar. The reason is simply the aerodynamics. Eighty-to-90% of the power at highway speeds is used to overcome air resistance. So the slipperier you can make the car, the less battery voltage you can put into the car. And that battery is what’s driving all the costs. So the slipperier you can make the car, the more competitively priced you can make your car. So they’re all going to look the same. We said we can’t do that. We’ve got to make ours look slippery but also look like a muscle car. That’s an oxymoron. So we went back into the archives and we said, “You know what? We answered this question 50 years ago.” In 1969, we were in Daytona and we were doing terrible. We had a guy who was a rocket scientist from NASA who was working for us. And he said, “you guys are doing this all wrong. You don’t need more power to be more competitive, you need better aero.” So he did the Charger Daytona for us at the time and it put the nose cone on and put the wing on the back. That car was so successful, it was the first NASCAR to break 200 mph. It was so successful, it got banned.<\/p>\n\n\n\n
So we said, “the answer is right in front of us. We need to put Gary Roberts front end on our car and then we can have a cool car and it’s reminiscent of the past.” The problem is, it’s ugly, right? So luckily, we’ve got Ralph (Gilles) and Ralph\u2019s a genius. He put the nose cone on the front and then he covered it up with an aerodynamic wing over that. So when you look at the car, you see a 1968 Charger. But if you get right up to it, you’re like, holy shit, it’s hollow. There’s actually a nose cone buried in there. It’s so cool.\u00a0<\/p>\n\n\n\n
The next one is it’s got to sound like a Dodge. So wait a minute, the electric car doesn’t make any sound. Even the fast ones, they don’t make any sound, but that’s one of the things that we’re known for. So let’s look at how gas car makes sound today. <\/p>\n\n\n\n
Yup. The Dodge Charger Daytona SRT Concept has an exhaust system despite not burning fuel.<\/figcaption><\/figure><\/div>\n\n\n\nReally all a gas car does is you put gas in the tank, and it burns the gas. When it burns gas, it moves the piston, the piston the moves air, the air moves at a certain volume and velocity comes through a pipe. We tune the pipe and that’s what comes out the back. People think it’s magic. It’s just the movement of air that\u2019s making the sound. So let’s do the same thing. Let’s look at an electric car and let’s look at the same inputs. Let’s look at throttle input. Let’s look at the aggressiveness of the tip into the throttle. Let’s look at off throttle. Let’s look at shifting. Let’s look at load on the engine; am I accelerating hard? Am I going uphill? Am I decelerating? Am I in between shifts? Let’s take all those inputs on an electric car and feed them all into a software algorithm. And let’s generate the movement of air based on those inputs. No different than the burning of gas. But let’s not pipe that into a car through a speaker. Let’s pipe it into an exhaust system that comes out of it an exhaust pipe in the back of the car. Now it becomes part of the experience. Now I can duplicate all of those same things that I had before.<\/p>\n\n\n\n
And then I can add in a shifting experience, electric cars don’t shift, but ours will. We’re going to have a system that gives you an electromechanical shifting system. And I’m going to give you multiple speeds in multiple shifts, so that I can give you that rapid increase of sound, the verbal between shifts, and all those things that you’ve come to love about muscle cars that you could never get with a linear acceleration. It won\u2019t make the car any faster, but it’ll make the car cooler.<\/p>\n\n\n\n
TDB:<\/strong> So it’s all algorithm driven?<\/p>\n\n\n\nTK: <\/strong>That’s why we had to patent it, because we wanted to share all these things with the people way in advance of the car coming out. You’re basically moving air, but you’re deciding how to move the air based on the physical inputs of the mechanical system. And then that air then comes through literally a physical exhaust system that you can point to see, touch and feel. It’s just air coming out the back of the car.<\/p>\n\n\n\nTDB: <\/strong>So you’re really trying to attach of as much as of the known traditional muscle car feeling to a vehicle where it doesn’t exist.<\/p>\n\n\n\nThe 2022 Dodge Challenger convertible can be ordered through Drop Top Customs, the oldest convertible coachbuilder in the U.S. It was unveiled during Dodge Speed Week.<\/figcaption><\/figure><\/div>\n\n\n\nTK: <\/strong>Yeah, and when you do that, you can make it sound like anything you want. You can make it sound like the Jetsons\u2019 car, you can make it sound like an F1 car. You can make it sound like anything you want. But we said we don’t want to do that because that just it’s not consistent with what we’re trying to do.<\/p>\n\n\n\nSo let’s give it a new fresh, modern sound, like the sound of an electric motor if it was completely unconstrained. That\u2019s why we call it a Banshee. If you think about a banshee, it\u2019s this wailing scream. So let’s give it this high pitched, high output screaming sound at wide open throttle. But when you’re off throttle, have that sound settle back down into a burbling, rumbling, idle, but not a V-8. But what we built into the idle is the base cadence of the firing order of a Hemi V-8. There’s something comfortable about it.<\/p>\n\n\n\n
TDB:<\/strong> When you started the EV transition, it must have seemed like a question mark.<\/p>\n\n\n\nTK:\u00a0<\/strong>We had a lot of things to overcome. Quite honestly, we were very worried about the aerodynamics. We knew we could make a fast EV, that’s super simple. And we didn’t know how to overcome the challenge with sound. But it was honestly the aero is the one that scared us the most. We knew we couldn’t put a 200-kWh battery in the car because you know, at $100-$150 per kilowatt hour, you’d never sell the car. So once we figured out the connection back to the Daytona and how to make the aero look like a proper muscle car, that gave us the confidence to go, OK, we can do this. We just can’t we just crossed the biggest hurdle, let’s figure out the rest. And that really, that’s when we started just accelerated going. We got this we can do this. And the innovation is just started pouring from there.<\/p>\n\n\n\nTDB: <\/strong>Tim, thank you for taking the time to talk with us, and your insights.<\/p>\n\n\n\nTK: <\/strong>Thanks man.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"TheDetroitBureau.com had a chance to sit down Dodge\u2019s CEO for an exclusive interview about transitioning into an electric future.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":13752,"featured_media":230845,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"_mo_disable_npp":"","footnotes":""},"categories":[8,7,5,1608,10,9],"tags":[7535,7545,7544,7536,7537,7538],"make":[49,106],"post-state":[],"category_old":[],"acf":[],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/thedetroitbureau.com\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/230855"}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/thedetroitbureau.com\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/thedetroitbureau.com\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/thedetroitbureau.com\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/13752"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/thedetroitbureau.com\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=230855"}],"version-history":[{"count":17,"href":"https:\/\/thedetroitbureau.com\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/230855\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":230879,"href":"https:\/\/thedetroitbureau.com\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/230855\/revisions\/230879"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/thedetroitbureau.com\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/230845"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/thedetroitbureau.com\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=230855"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/thedetroitbureau.com\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=230855"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/thedetroitbureau.com\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=230855"},{"taxonomy":"make","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/thedetroitbureau.com\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/make?post=230855"},{"taxonomy":"post-state","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/thedetroitbureau.com\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/post-state?post=230855"},{"taxonomy":"category_old","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/thedetroitbureau.com\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/category_old?post=230855"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}
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