The Elaborate Fake Exhaust System In The Electric 2024 Dodge Charger Daytona Is So Gloriously Stupid It’s Genius

Cars are not rational things. They never really have been, even if we try to make them so, at times. But they’re just not and few cars are less rational than muscle cars. That’s kind of the whole point of them. So when Dodge finally showed today the production form of their 2024 Dodge Charger Daytona, the first all-electric muscle car, I realized there’s really only one bit of that car that actually, genuinely fascinates me, and it has nothing to do with torque or 0-60 times or charging or range. It has to do with noise, specifically gleefully artificial noise, the whole grand theater of badassery. The new Charger pulls this off with a patented thing called the Fratzonic Chambered Exhaust System. I’m not sure it actually produces any exhaust, except perhaps at some remote power plant if you’re not using hydroelectric or nuclear or something, but there are chambers and it sure as hell is a fratzonic system. Let’s just take some time to appreciate this.

It might help to break down the name of this thing: “Fratzonic” refers to, of course, the powerful and mystical Fratzog, Dodge’s three-lobed symbol that – and I can’t prove this – is the sigil of whatever demon they’ve made a deal with to stay a viable concern. “Chambered” refers to the fact that, yes, this system includes chambers, “exhaust” indicates what all of this hardware is attempting to emulate, the thing that EVs, famously, don’t have to deal with, and “system” because, well, it’s all pretty complicated.

The whole point of this system is to make this normally quite quiet electric car make lots of loud noises, and not just noises, but vibrations, too! From the patent abstract:

Abstract: An active vibration enhancement (AVE) system for a vehicle without an internal combustion engine includes a sensor system configured to monitor and sense an operational condition of the vehicle, a force generator configured to couple to the vehicle and generate vibrations into the vehicle, a controller in signal communication with the sensor system and configured to receive one or more signals from the sensor system indicative of the sensed operational condition of the vehicle. The controller is configured to, based on the one or more received signals, actuate the force generator ot generate vibrations into the vehicle that mimic vibrations that would be produced by a predetermined internal combustion engine operating at the sensed operational condition of the vehicle.

So, this is a whole system, complete with sensors and physical pipes and speakers and electronics that is designed to mimic the noise and vibration of an internal combustion engine. For about a century or so, one of the biggest engineering goals of carmakers has been the exact opposite of this, making cars that are as silent and smooth as possible, hiding all those thousands of explosions inside those cylinders, which is why hyperswanky carmakers like Rolls-Royce would run ads like this:

Also, $14 grand for a Rolls-Royce! What a steal! And no, I’m not going to do the conversion to 2024 bucks just to ruin this good feeling of seeing a Roller that costs less than a Mitsubishi Mirage, so if you want that manner of buzzkill, you’re on your own.

The bigger point here is that humans are absolutely ridiculous beings. We, collectively, labored for so long and so hard to make cars that were quiet and smooth, cars that glide silently down roads as though buoyed on a cloud of pure meringue, and acting like they were in the strictest of libraries. And now, now that thanks to high-density battery systems and powerful electric motors, that dream is firmly within our grasp! We can build silent, fast, smooth cars, cars with none of that clumsy reciprocating motion, cars that just spin shafts with a gentle hum and whir, and what do we do with that? We build cars that are capable of such subtle feats and then engineer wildly complex systems to make them seem like their noisy, crude ancestors from decades earlier.

Why? Because we’re, again, not rational. We don’t do things that make any sense! And the effort we spend taking rational things, like an electric-powered vehcile, and making them more expensive and complex and power-hungry to do something irrational is staggering. Just look at what is involved with this Fratzonic Chambered Exhaust System:

Even though there’s nothing in the Charger that makes any sort of exhaust emissions, unless we count you in the driver’s seat and your post-burrito miasmas, the car is still equipped with an exhaust pipe and a muffler, sort of:

Look at that thing; there’s actual exhaust pipes, and they are exhausting something, sound waves, propagated over the same  70/30 nitrogen-oxygen mixture we like to breathe and use for talking and occasionally whistling. The sounds, informed by sensors and whatever about the demands being placed on the drivetrain, are created by those four speakers you see in there, and those speakers pump their synthesized combustion-engine noises through resonant pipes, just like how the pulses of exhausted gases would flow were there eight pistons on the other end.

This isn’t just some speaker; this is serious business, for something deeply and unapologetically unserious. Dodge’s Theatrical Audio engineers were not satisfied with just speakers making sounds – which has been done on EVs many times before, sometimes for safety reasons, even – but they decided they needed to replicate some of a combustion car’s intestines just to get the sound feeling more real, because they’re actually including real exhaust system-style parts. On a car that, again, produces no exhaust.

The loudness of the system can reach 126 decibels, same as how loud the 6.2-liter V8 engine in the Dodge Challenger SRT Hellcat is. Plus, by using that number, it shows you how thoughtful Dodge’s engineers are, because the threshold of pain when it comes to loudness is 130 decibels, a solid four decibels away!

I love this. It’s so absurd. I know a lot of people who make a big point to roll their eyes at cars that fake engine sounds, and I’ll admit, that was me once, too, but now I’ve come to embrace it. Because all of this engineering and hardware is only for the purpose of making you happier, if it can. That’s it! That’s all this does. It tries to make you smile. It has no other purpose! And the levels Dodge went to in pursuit of this noble, inane goal don’t stop there!

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They built systems to shake the car, too. There’s a pair of vibration motors on the frame rails to vibrate the car like you’re running on seven cylinders and you lost a chunk of flywheel. There’s entire engineering fields relating to Noise, Vibration, and Harshness (NVH), and those engineers have spent over a hundred years trying to eliminate all the N, V, and H. And now, in a mass-market car anyone can buy, there are entire systems designed to inject some V and probably H into the experience.

Here, you can hear a pre-production version of all of this here:

If you were an engineer working on the new 1962 Dodge Polara 500 (the first car to feature a Fratzog, btw) and you went up to your boss and said, hey, I have this great idea where we can bolt on a couple of unbalanced electric motors to the chassis to make the car vibrate wildly, you’d have gotten a cigarette put out on your forehead and a suggestion to make like a something and get the fuck out of here. Because, objectively, this is nuts.

It’s nuts, but this is where we are. In order to make EVs palatable we’re pulling some of the unavoidable secondary traits and idiosyncrasies about how combustion engines work, but those traits and signatures of an imperfect machine have become so comfortable and expected by us that we don’t want to let them go.

This is by no means unique to cars; this notion shows up in almost every human endeavor. Here’s two examples, from architecture and typography:

In classical Greek architecture, above the Doric columns you may see, you’ll notice those three vertical rectangle things. Those are triglyphs, and they’re an adaption of how the ends of wooden beams looked when ancient Greeks built crude huts and other shelters. In marble or stone or concrete there are no wooden beams there, but the look persists, long after they have lost all associations with the original source.

Serifs on letters are similar! The serif is thought to represent the way a brush thickens and makes a bigger mark at the beginning and end of strokes, so when letters were written with brushes, they’d have thicker bits at their ends. This look got translated into letterforms when letters started being carved into stone, and they’re still with us today, even as you read letters made of pixels displayed in liquid crystals on your screen.

Humans like the idiosyncratic details and flaws and weirdnesses of the things we make. Those imperfections are what character eventually oozes out of, and we love character. That’s all that any of this is: we’re reproducing and exaggerating the unintended side effects of combustion engines because we have decades and decades of cultural experience with loud-ass muscle cars revving and screaming and going stupid fast because, somehow, that might just be what it takes to get some other person as horny as we are.

Yes, this is all stupid. Of course it’s stupid. But that’s what these cars have always been about, it’s how Dodge has survived these past couple decades, not by being smarter than everyone else, but by being wonderfully and delightedly stupider, willing to build cars like the 707 horsepower Hellcat that any idiot can buy and no idiot is even remotely qualified to drive in anger.

There’s other ways of being this stupid, but so many of them like to cloak themselves in the haughty robes of Engineering Marvels, like the Bugattis Veyron and Chiron, which are, let’s be clear here, just as dumb as a Hellcat for absurdly more money. People into Engineering Marvels will likely roll their eyes at these noise-fakery-theater systems, but I can confidently say that is a deeply wrong opinion.

What Dodge is doing here is so honestly and unashamedly human it makes me want to cry at the aching beauty of it all. Even though every day I’m bombarded with evidence that should make me change my mind, I absolutely adore human beings, and I adore them because of things like this. I adore them because of the incredible amount of effort they’ll put into something so ridiculous and silly. Rationally, this car should not exist. No muscle car should exist, rationally. Cars should be efficient, standardized things that transport everyone where they need to go and you never have to think about them, at all.

But if that’s how it was, I’d go bonkers. I’d hate it. You’d hate it. Everyone would hate it, except for the sorts of people you’d rather drink antifreeze than spend an elevator ride with. The reason we love cars are for reasons like this – massive engineering and design projects undertaken solely for the purpose of making you feel like a badass.

My god, we’re stupid. I love it.

 

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