2022 Dodge Challenger R/t Plus on 2040-cars

Auto blog

Cold start comparison: 2020 Alfa Romeo Giulia Quadrifoglio vs. 2013 Dodge Challenger SRT8

The 2020 Alfa Romeo Giulia Quadrifoglio is a five-seat, compact luxury sport sedan packing 505 horsepower thanks to a 2.9-liter twin-turbocharged V6. My personal 2013 Dodge Challenger SRT8 392 is ... well ... not. It's a full-sized muscle coupe whose iron-block 6.4-liter V8 makes 470 hp in the very traditional way: it's freakin' huge, like everything else about the car.  On paper, these two have nothing in common beyond the fact that they were built by the same multi-national manufacturing entity.  But if paper were the be-all and end-all of automotive rankings, everybody would buy the same car. And we don't, especially as enthusiasts. Whether it's looks or tuning or vague "intangibles" or something as simple as the way a car sounds, we often put a priority on the things that trigger our emotions rather than setting out to simply buy whatever the "best" car is at that particular moment.  So, what do these two have in common? They both sound really, really good. Like looks, sounds are subjective. While a rubric most assuredly exists in the world of marketing (attraction is as much a science as any other human response), we have no way of objectively scoring the beauty of either of these cars, and the same applies to the qualities of the sound waves being emitted through their tail pipes.  But we can measure how loud they are. In fact, there's even an app for that. Dozens, as it turns out. So, I picked one at random that recorded peak loudness levels, and set off to conduct an entirely pointless and only vaguely scientific experiment with the two cars that happened to be in my garage at the same time.  For the test, I opened up a window and cracked the garage door (so as not to inflict carbon monoxide poisoning upon myself in the name of discovery), and then placed my phone on a tripod behind the center of each car's trunk lid. I fired each one up and let the app do the rest. I then placed my GoPro on top of the trunk for each test so that I could review the video afterward for any anomalies.  I started with the Challenger. The 6.4-liter Hemi under the hood of this big coupe is essentially the same lump found under the hood of quite a few Ram pickups, and it has the accessories to prove it. Its starter is loud and distinctive. Almost as loud, it turns out, as the exhaust itself. As its loud pew-pew faded behind the V8's barking cold start, we recorded a peak of 83.7 decibels. In the app's judgment, that's roughly the equivalent of a busy street.

Zombie cars: Discontinued vehicles that aren't dead yet

Car models come and go, but as revealed by monthly sales data, once a car is discontinued, it doesn't just disappear instantly. And in the case of some models, vanishing into obscurity can be a slow, tedious process. That's the case with the 12 cars we have here. All of them have been discontinued, but car companies keep racking up "new" sales with them. There are actually more discontinued cars that are still registering new sales than what we decided to include here. We kept this list to the oldest or otherwise most interesting vehicles still being sold as new, including a supercar. We'll run the list in alphabetical order, starting with *drumroll* ... BMW 6 Series: 55 total sales BMW quietly removed the 6 Series from the U.S. market during the 2019 model year. It had been available in three configurations, a hardtop coupe, a convertible and a sleek four-door coupe-like shape.   BMW i8: 18 total sales We've always had a soft spot for the BMW i8, despite the fact that it never quite fit into a particular category. It was sporty, but nowhere near as fast as similarly-priced competitors. It looked very high-tech and boasted a unique carbon fiber chassis design and a plug-in hybrid powertrain, but wasn't really designed for maximum efficiency or maximum performance. Still, the in-betweener was very cool to look at and drive, and 18 buyers took one home over the course of 2021.   Chevy Impala: 750 total sales The Impala represented classic American tastes at a time when American tastes were shifting away from soft-riding sedans with big interior room and trunk space and into higher-riding crossovers. A total of 750 sales were inked last year.   Chrysler 200: 15 total sales The Chrysler 200 was actually a pretty nice sedan, with good looks and decent driving dynamics let down by a lack of roominess, particularly in the back seat. Of course, as we said regarding the Chevy Impala, the number of Americans in the market for sedans is rapidly winding down, and other automakers are following Chrysler's footsteps in canceling their slow-selling four-doors. Even if Chrysler never really found its footing in the ultra-competitive midsize sedan segment, apparently dealerships have a few leftover 2017 200s floating around. And for some reason, 15 buyers decided to sign the dotted line to take one of these aging sedans home last year.

Detroit's new fleet of donated police cars have safety issues [w/video]

In a show of generosity in mid-August, Detroit's business leaders donated $8 million to the Police Department and Fire Department in order to buy 100 new police vehicles and 23 EMS ambulances. But now officers have discovered - and complained - that the police vehicles have glaring safety issues, Deadline Detroit reports. It is not made clear what models of the fleet vehicles - which include police versions of the Ford Taurus, the Chevrolet Caprice and the Dodge Charger - are affected by the safety issues.
Officers reportedly have complained that the Plexiglass partition separating front-seat officers and back-seat prisoners is easily breached, and that the front passenger seat is installed too close to the dashboard. Prisoners who manage to writhe out of their handcuffs can bend the Plexiglass and reach into the cockpit, and sitting too close to the dashboard can render airbags more dangerous and make officers more vulnerable to injury in a crash.
Mark Diaz, president of the Detroit Police Officers Association, received the complaints and reportedly said the vehicles would get safety updates addressing the issues. But Deadline Detroit reports that it checked some of the offending police cars and, as of the last few days, they hadn't been updated.