joeyr

Powerful machines still excite, but fewer drivers willing to buy rubber burners

Monday, February 11, 2008
Scott Burgess

I love the new Challenger. Love it. Love it. Love it.

I love its Hemi growl, its long, low silhouette. It's the car that perfectly melds nostalgia with modern times. And since Dodge debuted the performance version of the 2008 Challenger SRT8 at the Chicago Auto Show on Wednesday, I haven't been able to stop looking at more pictures of it, thinking, 'It will be mine. Oh, yes, it will be mine.'

I'm not alone. More than 10,000 people have ordered this 425-horsepower beast, snapping up all of the 2008 models and some of the 2009 version, said Mike Accavitti, Dodge's director of marketing. While he didn't offer a breakdown of buyer demographics, the customer seems obvious: baby boomers cashing out 401(k)s, hoping to rekindle those days from the early '70s when life was coupes, convertibles and flat stomachs.

But the Challenger's Phoenix-like rise won't bring back the '70s. It may push some Dodge iron, but not much. It's like hitting a homerun during a Red Wings game -- nice, but doesn't put anything on the board. Somewhere between $3-a-gallon gas and eco-nuts protecting me from my horsepower-hungry self, the age of cramming V-8s into coupes is ending.

These rubber-burning monsters will become footnotes to man's fuel-gobbling excess, coming out once a year to parade along Woodward Avenue and perhaps the occasional Sunday drive. They will remain in people's garages as collector items, enthusiasts' hobbies or foolish investments for those hoping to turn a profit during the 2030 Barrett-Jackson auction.

"This could be the last hurrah for the Challenger," Trevor Creed, the very man responsible for the Challenger's resurrection, told me during the Detroit auto show last month.

Creed, Chrysler LLC's senior vice president of design, is just reading the soot-stained writing on the catalytic converter.

Detroit's automakers may be winning the horsepower war, which has gone from crazy to insane, but they're still losing the hearts and minds of consumers around the country.

Boomers may look fondly at the Challenger, the Ford Mustang and the upcoming Chevy Camaro, but they keep buying Toyota Camrys, Honda Accords and Nissan Altimas.

The current Mustang opened the window to the latest pony car craze. The retro-styled, redesigned 2005 Mustang arrived at precisely the right time. Sales jumped 24 percent the first year and topped 166,000 units in 2006.

But how expectations have changed. Forty years ago, Ford sold 425,000 1968 Mustangs, and that wasn't even one of the good models. Last year Mustang sales dropped to 134,000 units. By comparison, Toyota Motor Corp. sold more than 180,000 Priuses in 2007.

Automakers will kill muscle
Sexy, powerful machines may make the covers of buff books, but fewer find their way into people's driveways.

The window is closing and the full lineups for the Camaro and Challenger are still a year away. No one could have predicted the dramatic change in consumer tastes, high fuel prices and eco-politics when designers started penning those car's revivals. And the politicians have made sure to leave their fingerprints on the V-8 pulling engine hoists, passing inane fuel-economy standards that address America's dependency on foreign oil about as well as Congress exemplifies bipartisanship.

The laws won't kill our beloved beefy road warriors, car companies will.

As every automaker attempts to find more ways to make a car go another mile on the same gallon of gas, they'll be forced to move more people off of high-powered projects and onto economical ones, said Tadge Juechter, GM's vehicle chief engineer for the Chevrolet Corvette and Cadillac XLR.

"There's going to be a lot of internal pressure to move engineering resources to these other products; that's going to reall

joeyr

A nice counter point.

Thursday, February 14, 2008
Manny Lopez:

Muscle cars have power to live on


Nobody goes to the auto show to see appliances. Never have, never will.

They go for the exotic and the exciting, and that almost always means muscle. Two years ago, when Ford Motor Co. fired up its Interceptor concept on the show floor in Detroit, people headed for the 400-horsepower sedan like moths to a flame.

Similarly, earlier this month in Chicago, it was the 425-horsepower Dodge Challenger that drew them in.

Pity the modified golf carts posing as actual cars that sat nearby, ignored.

Muscle wins, every time. And it always will.

"Muscle cars aren't dead by any means at all," says Randy Martin, president of the Eastern Michigan Camaro Club. "Not even close."

Certainly the market is changing, but the supposed demise of the muscle car has been happening for 30-plus years. It's the longest last hurrah in history. Witness the death (2002) and rebirth (2009) of the Camaro; and the Challenger, which hit the skids in 1974 until 2008.

I know I sit in the minority and an even smaller universe of big engine defenders, but as the owner of a 1966 Mustang, whose straight-6 engine was thankfully yanked out and replaced with a 302 V-8, it's hard to accept that the muscle car will evolve into a "stylish vehicle as opposed to something that just breathes fire and has more cubic inches than the next guy," as Troy Clarke, General Motors Corp.'s president of North America, told The Detroit News.

Sorry, but a metrosexual "muscle car" doesn't cut it.

I understand that the V-6 versions of the Chevrolet Camaro, Dodge Challenger and Ford Mustang, will be more popular than the ones that "breathe fire" but those products wouldn't sell if it weren't for the big boys. The auto companies smartly show off the brawn and fire up the engines at auto shows to pique people's interest, then sell scaled-down versions to the mass market.

Automakers know there's a muscle car market, too. The 500-horsepower Cadillac CTS-V is the one that turns heads. I'll go out on a limb and predict that there won't be a 6-cylinder Corvette anytime soon, if ever.

Perhaps, as News Auto Critic Scott Burgess predicted in a column earlier this week, manufacturer-supplied V-8s will go the way of the eight-track tape, but "car guys" will tweak and upgrade and modify their rides six ways to Sunday. And there's a $36 billion specialty automotive aftermarket to support that.

"I'm sure that many companies are already lining up products for the Camaro and Challenger" as they did with Mustangs, says Neil Holcomb, president of the Mustang Owners Club of Southeastern Michigan.

And the market will survive because not everyone wants to drive an appliance.

http://www.detnews.com/apps/pbcs.dll...42/1386/AUTO01

Jeremiah 29:11

That is sad if that is true.

Somebody should have been shot for inventing such a word.

I have never owned a foreign car yet.

I do plan to get my big V-8 before they disappear.

RLSH700

The first guy is missing the point. People who buy Camries, Altimas, and Accords are not buying these cars as a substitute for Mustangs, they are buying them as substitutes to Fusions, Avengers, and Malibus. The seniors who are buying family sedans are doing it out of consideration for their grandchildren or because they still have their own children living at home. The focus for these cars should be aimed for not only baby boomers, but for the youth who want to enjoy their young and rustic years. It is not limited to the baby boomers although the top level models like the SRTs and Shelbys can more easily be afforded by baby boomers, that is why you have more than one model. Generally V6 models tend to be the most common, so nothing surprising here.

The issue with the sales of the Prius is an irrelevant comparison. About 90% of the audience that buys a Prius would never consider a muscle car. The Prius is a car not based on saving money since study after study shows that a typical compact will save more money in the long run, its about this belief of "saving the environment." Also remember that the current Mustang has been out since 2005 and is due for an update before long. It hasn't been given a real update since it was introduced, this is perfectly logical that a bit of a slow down has happened. That is also more units sold last year than either the Charger or 300, so that is still a noteworthy number. I have trouble believing a lot of this criticism after I have read that the Taurus that gets up to 28mpg (31mpg under the old standards) and yet I remember reading it has failed to have nearly as many sales and that the Fusion hasn't exactly been a homerun when it offers much better fuel economy.

LOL! That is one of the strangest terms I have heard.

Jeremiah 29:11

Yeah, I think it was invented about 7 years ago to describe a guy who spends to much time make himself look good.

RLSH700

Funny how we have to make a new term about sex as if it wasn't disgusted enough to redefine someone who is in-love with himself. My question is if Metrosexual is a term that is supposed to describe a man, why don't they use that term to describe women who like things that males tend to enjoy like camping, fishing, hunting, etc.

lear4406

I lived in the end time of the muscle car and picked up a few along the way. And they said this is it boys... end of the muscle cars. And they were right for a few years. But then the technology started chipping away at the problems and slowly but surely the muscle car came back. Flexing its new found muscle. Today we stand at the brink of yet another end to the loved muscle car. American muscle that is and the only way we serve it... big cubes with abundance of HP on tap. I hope I save 2 more for when the next end of the muscle car comes A nice 2009 Challenger R/T and a really nice example of the top of the line Challenger SRT-8. But lets enjoy these last hoorahs and hit the streets before we can't afford to feed these beasts any more. Light em up boys.. tires ain't cheap, but times a wasting I want my sons to enjoy this time around and see what its all about. Tristan, my oldest has a 2006 Daytona so he's fully aware of the enjoyment a V-8 brings. Joshua my youngest will get a chance to pilot my Challengers and he may get the fever too.

Jeremiah 29:11

I enjoyed that quick history to the present tour.

I agree and all get one and light them up.

I'll make a toast. Burnt rubber anyone????

purnrg

Metrosexual??, Is this some type of new minority? Everytime I hear or read that term I think of the old joke about the Russian guy that is "Strong Like Bull - Smart Like Streetcar".
I wonder what you get when 2 "Metrosexuals" procreate? Maybe "Suburbasexuals" LOL

RLSH700

I think technology will always find a way around things, plus I heard some information that sounds as though it might eventually solve our fuel problem. I think the market will eventually correct itself.

purnrg, no that just a new term for "girlie-men." Are they a minority? If so they are one of the most powerful minorities ever. Many politicians are described as being this way. They are obsessed with their appearance and nothing else.