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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The Elaborate Fake Exhaust System In The Electric 2024 Dodge Charger Daytona Is So Stupid
fixed the headline
I don’t like that the sound projects outwards to annoy everyone else, but I don’t mind the idea of it working on the inside even though I prefer architecture that’s not beholden to archaic motifs and I hate serif typefaces!
This is a really good point I think – creating something that purposefully imposing on unwilling bystanders rather than willing occupants isn’t a good thing, in business or society.
I like that electrics emit some sound (walking through a parking lot recently, I was pleased to be able to hear the hum of a e-Jeep coming up behind me), but I really hope Dodge will end up limiting the exterior volume while allowing the driver to turn it up as loud as he wants inside. Esp if the loudest settings require the windows be up.
I like that the Polestar2 emits a bit of a sci-fi sonar sound when backing up. Inoffensive, but not too cartoonish.
And then I shudder when I think about some of the ringtones available when that was all the rage
I like when electrics sound futuristic – matches their looks.
The underrated Andrew Niccol movie In Time features EV Charger police cars, and they have a wonderful scifi but purposeful sound.
But I hadn’t considered that point about ringtones. Unless of course there’s a Knight Rider tone available, maybe…
I am not a fan of the noise generators on currently available EVs and some PHEV/hybrids. They make a louder noise than most ICE cars that are typically silent at crawl around parking lot speeds. I really don’t think they are necessary at all.
My mum’s epically delicious meringues had a wispily friable outer layer that collapsed in your mouth to release a slightly toffee-like core, so that sounds to me like driving a car whose suspension mounts fail in a cloud of rust flakes, then the rest of the suspension gooily dissolves in wet weather.
“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”
The irony being ACTUAL badasses all drive beat to shit Pontiacs that make noise and vibration the old fashioned way: Rusted out exhaust systems and worn out motor mounts.
Pontiac: The official brand of IDGAF!
Depending on where in the production run that Roller falls, $14k is going to work out to a 2024 equivalent of between $130k and $160k (pending optional extras, depending on whose math you’re using for calculations)
All this reminds me of is the South Park episode with the Harley fans, “Haburburbur, haburburbur!” It also parallels the people who would want this functionality.
I love the context regarding architecture and typesetting. What you point to is pretty profound, i think. There’s all kinds of interesting thought–from philosophy, social theory, psychology–that might shed some light or, minimally, speculate on this human phenomenon that you point out. What your description of this behavior brought to mind for me is more from political philosophy and what might be identified as the fundamental conservative nature of the human psyche, or, perhaps better said, that conservatism makes up one aspect of our nature and how we take in the world. Conservatism, broadly conceived, refers essentially to a preference for what is known and a certain skepticism for alterations to it. Unmoor your association with that word from contemporary politics (especially since in many ways the present right wing in the U.S. has abandoned conservatism for radical populism) and you begin to see the appeal of this position. It is, in fact, deeply rational to not only be more comfortable with but to prefer what is already known and well understood. Change inevitably involves risk due to its unknown nature. What’s really fun here is that this conservatism also pops up in, as you point out, deeply irrational ways, like making new and, arguably, greatly improved things resemble their cruder forebears. It’s not quite lizard brain stuff because it serves an important social purpose, but it’s also not quite hard edged positivist, so-called rational thought either. Such things are often lumped into the ambit of the arts; i.e. they are aesthetic in nature. Oddly, thinking of it this way rationalizes the behavior, as the pursuit of beauty is its own form of rationality. Rationality, of course, is an extremely slippery term, but shorn of its moral or judgmental aspect, it mostly boils down to the ability to offer consistent defensible reasons for one’s thoughts or actions. I’ve always considered, though, that there is a certain circularity to our relationship with this concept: we define ourselves against the rest of the ‘natural’ world with respect to our rational faculties, and if we are rational beings then what we think and do gives shape to this concept and what qualifies as rational. Also save the manuals.
There are things like triglyphs in architecture and serifs in typography that are nods to older traditions and styles.
There is also jumping the shark.
I’ll leave it to others to decide which this is…
Excellent counter point
Oh no. I was afraid the electric fart can was coming and here it is. This is basically a siren that says “look at meeeeeee! Please, please, please look at meeeeeeeeeee!” at the expense of the rest of our ears. I can admire the stupidity in choosing to design it but not the stupidity of choosing to use it.
DAMMIT you beat me to it by less than a minute.
OEM fart can?
OEM fart can!
Well they do call it a Fartsonic Chamber, right?
We need to figure out a way to crowdsource autocorrect everywhere into changing “Fratzonic” into “Fartsonic.”
Also, “Electronic fart can” wasn’t on my 2024 bingo card…
I will buy a Rich Corinthian membership if one of these systems is installed on David’s i3, including the out-of-balance electric shaker motor. Heck, I’ll help develop it!
Seems like you could probably read the throttle position and vehicle speed from CANbus, and use that to set the “RPM” of the loudspeaker and shaker. For audio, I remember there have been a few cats mentioned on this site. Combine some purring and other cat noises, adjust the octave up/down a couple times as needed and you’ll have a great Autopizonic Sound System
And once perfected, license the idea and Autopian name to a factory with a purely voluntary labor force (we promise!) in Xinjiang and watch and hear the money roll in!
126dB might be under the threshold for pain, but levels causing hearing loss are well below that, generally in the 90s, one-eighth as loud. This is entirely irresponsible; just because you can, doesn’t mean you should. Attorney Generals will be lining up to pursue 8-figure settlements while innocent pedestrians suffer the consequent tinnitus.
If they haven’t gone after the Harleys yet then i’m not sure they’ll be after Dodge OEM fartcans
Stock Harleys aren’t that loud though are they, pretty sure 99.9% of them have aftermarket exhausts
Perhaps Harleys have been ignored by AGs because the company bearly has 2 cents to rub together… now that I think of it, possibly also true for Dodge/Stellantis.
I became deaf due to some morons blasting a bomb near me. The gap between what I can begin to hear and what becomes physically painful is quite narrow.
Imbeciles with fartcans deserve to have a baseball bat tested on their skulls, and I give no fucks whether they drive an expensive ass Harley or a cheap chinese moped.
Expelling damaging noises just beccause you like it is nothing but base-less agression. And should be responded as such.
No
Go to any youtube site featuring the start up, idle and full throttle sounds of an EMD SD70, SD80 or SD90 MAC Diesel Locomotive. One of the greatest sounds in internal combustion sounds. THAT is the sound I’d want my electric Charger Daytona to be emulating.
Ugh. Wish Autopian would have an edit feature!
It does?
Yes, but the option disappears quickly.
Wait for it… maybe they’ll apply something like that to their electric pickup.
(Although, technically, model locomotives would have beaten them to the punch by a decade or more.)
Those engines are GM products. That might be a problem.
I, for one, am enamored with the new Charger. When everyone is building electric crossovers, Dodge builds a giant coupe! There’s nothing else like it on the market, and definitely not from a mainstream brand. I think it looks great, and I hope it sounds like the concept car – a new, unique, electric sound, not an imitation of internal combustion. I hope the price is attainable…
Me too. Makes me understand why Dodge was so sanguine about killing off the predecessors/letting Ford seemingly emerge victorious – it’s (hopefully) thinking to go at this a little differently. Who knows what GM will do, but this is encouraging enough for now.
I couldn’t be happier. Sure, I’m a Ford guy, but competition makes everything better for everyone!
For real. I don’t want one even remotely but anything different in the industry is to be celebrated, particularly around here i would think.
I’m not totally convinced there is one singular person on this earth who actually wants this, and is willing to pay for it. Why do you want a 126 decimal reminder of what you don’t have? This is like sitting thru the new Star Wars with a guy you paid, yelling “Hey remember the originals weren’t those great!”.
I agree this is completely absurd and hilarious in a good way, but my god I’d feel like a poser driving around with this system on.
I’d be embarrassed to drive a car that has to make brrrm brrrm noises to make me feel like a big boy, but then I’m not the target demographic for this car.
Does it come with an OFF switch?
It needs to be an option if it must exist at all.
Finally a subscription service we can all agree on!
They could have saved a lot of engineering effort by just equipping the car with wire-spoke wheels and a place to mount a clothespin and playing card on each wheel.
Love the Weird Al reference in the topshot!!
Okay, now I’ll read the article.
It doesn’t spit flames?
No sale
It could, with an after market exhaust looking tube, it’s own butane tank, and an electronic ignition.
It would make just as much sense.
I feel like it should dispense drinks, and release those nice smells that they have on Disney rides.
It would also be great if it could slowly poop cans of beer for tailgates.
I understand noise makers are required on BEVs, but I’d much rather have the pedestrian equivalent of those stick on deer warning things than one more electrical system whose gremlins I’ll eventually have to fight.
To use a great term I learned from Jason’s other articles: isn’t this fairly skeuomorphic, making a electric car sound like an ICE one?
Will that Jason debate this one?
Maybe loud exhausts make their driver happier but I contend that their happiness is often enhanced by other people’s annoyance. There is a word for this, misanthropy.
Is it Dodge Charger day at The Autopian?
It’s Dodge Charger Day on the internet because Dodge released a bunch of details. (This, in my opinion, is the best place to celebrate Dodge Charger Day, because I haven’t seen other sites getting into the specifics of the noisemaking system or comparing it to serifs.)
I can’t believe the Dodge Charger is stealing my Truck Month thunder!