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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Ghost of J.C. Whitney
I can picture some farmer 120 years ago making his son bang together two coconut shells to mimic the manly sounds of a galloping horse as he shamefully drove his newfangled Model T through the center of town.
Jetsons sound. That’s the one for me.
Well, make that two for Robert Heinlein. He described the ‘hydraulic bed’ so well in Stranger In a Strange Land that the USPO initially rejected efforts to patent waterbeds, on the grounds that the novel constituted prior art. Now, we have the elaborate internal combustion exhaust emulation system for a non-IC vehicle, as described in the 1985 sci-fi story The Cat Who Walks Through Walls.
In this excerpt, our time-traveling protagonist is walking down a country road in the early 22nd century and serendipitously meets their uncle, who happens to be at the helm of a replica Ford Model T:
“Starting about 2150 or a little bit earlier… supreme swank for an Iowa farmer was to own and drive a working replica of a twentieth century “automobile” personal transport vehicle. Of course not a vehicle moved by means of internal explosions of a derivative of rock oil: Even the People’s Republic of South Africa had laws against placing poisons in the air. But with its Shipstone concealed and a sound tape to supply the noise of a soi-disant “IC” engine, the difference between a working replica and a real “automobile” was not readily apparent.
This one was the swankiest of all replicas, a Tin Lizzy, a “Ford touring car, Model T, 1914.”
“Need a lift, folks?” Uncle Jock asked. Up close the racket was horrible…”
If I had the money to buy one of these things, then I’ll be looking for a third-party kit to remove all that noise- and vibration-generating crap.
The damn car weighs like 5,500 lbs. Seems like an easy place to start some weight savings.
I guess I get where you’re coming from, but I can’t stan EV fart cans.
The pure EV whine on Ken Block’s EV Gymkhana, though? Hot DAYUM I wish every car sounded like that.
It won’t be long until there are aftermarket amplifiers available for this to make it even more stupid!
It is indeed simultaneously amazing and stupid. Heavy and not necessarily a great use of electricity. But who cares when you’re tipping three tons and doing burnouts.
I predict 99% of the units will eventually be recycled by audio enthusiasts. Insanely powerful (126db) woofers (2 channel!) for $45? Hell yes! 😀
“ 70/30 nitrogen-air mixture ”?
If that’s what Jason is breathing, it explains a lot!
It’s cool. Imagine they will eventually add things like jet engine exhaust brake lights. This is like when styles don’t add functionality but people still get feels. Fake hood scoops on a Pinto, fake tail fins on a Pinto, fake custom stripes on a Pinto, fake leather steering wheel grip on a Pinto, fake custom hub-caps on a Pinto! You know?
Initially this was described as attaching analog sound amplifiers to the electric motors to make them louder, which I think to some degree is still happening here, but I don’t like the idea of mixing “fake” sounds into it, nor do I want to feel vibrations I know are fake in a real car. Call me irrational for being rational all you want, my irrationality is that I DO want electric cars to be loud like internal combustion, but I want 100% of the noise and vibrations to come from the drive motors and nothing else. Is that irrational? I don’t know. It’s unnecessary yet I’m rationally saying I don’t want my car to make fake noises, so I irrationally want to amplify the quiet noises that do mean something.
At the end of the day, we gearheads like the noises our cars make because they mean something. Specifically, they mean explosions are happening in a certain sequence and number under the hood, which produces the power that makes us happy. Faking the power noises with speakers and vibrators, however realistic, is still deeply unsatisfying on a certain level because it’s like stuffing a sock down your pants or photoshopping yourself to look prettier or carrying around massive wads of $1 bills to look wealthier than you are, or any number of other methods of living a lie.
I still want to hear what makes the car powerful, and that’s irrational. Maybe it’s irrational to hate a system that’s supposed to make us happy by lying to us, but it’s that persistent feeling of deception that makes me so annoyed with so many aspects of the modern world. Lies, distractions, diversions… I want to see things as they actually are, and if they’re not good the way they are then it’s up to us to do something about it, not hide it or cover it up and pretend it isn’t actually that way. I just want something genuine, darn it.
… And if it was just a system to amplify the sounds of the electric motor, as simply as attaching resonators directly to it and solid-mounting the thing so it doesn’t isolate itself from the rest of the car – essentially turning the whole car into a resonator, then I’d celebrate that. It would make the car loud, give you some aural feedback without being fake. This can be done! Listen to some of the electric motors in Aptera’s prototypes, they sound awesome! It’s a shame Aptera says the production motors will be silent, a noisy electric motor is a glorious thing.
There are even different types of electric motors out there that vibrate as a byproduct of how they function, which could totally be used in an EV and give some sense of driver feedback, but it’s not a lie created by devices in the car that serve no other function but to vibrate.
I honestly believe a fun, loud, engaging production EV could be built without faking any part of the experience. Choose noisy, vibrating motors from the get go, tune the car to resonate with them so you hear the motors and feel what they do, give it hydraulic power steering or keep it manual to make the car feel engaging to drive. While we’re at it, some early electric cars did speed control by “shifting” using sets of relays, so depending on throttle position, power was being sent through different circuits which made noticeable clicks from the relays every time the speed changes. I imagine you could make something like a manual transmission for EVs that way, and it wouldn’t be fake, it would have nothing to do with software, it would literally be an electromechanical switch mechanism that physically changes the way electricity is sent to the motor.
I’m perfectly fine with irrational cars and cars with design decisions that don’t make any sense outside of just being fun, charming, or interesting. What I DON’T want is to live in a simulation. When the simulation is more appealing than the real world, we’ve truly lost our way as a society and as humans. Making EVs that pretend go too far in pretending to be ICE cars like this is an insult to humanity, and it doesn’t have to be this way.
I rationally want and electric car to be silent as possible. I own a MINI and I love the pop and burble from the exhaust in Sport Mode but I’ve also driven some electric cars and love their silence.
I’m a longtime Mopar fan. I’ve owned several.
THIS IS THE STUPIDEST THING IVE EVER SEEN ON A STREET CAR!
Imagine a heavy metal band pumping through a concert system directly in front of you. Then add 10db. 126db would be crazy loud, but glorious. Imagine getting pulled over because of the noise and watching the cop try to figure out what the hell is going on.
I think frankly, it’s brave of Stellantis to market a giant vibrator to the target audience of the Dodge Charger- that takes cajones!
Yes, I get that cars are not rational things and this theatre of noise and vibration is for entertainment but it misses the point – EVs are awesome in other ways and pretending to be a big V8 muscle car is like a grown man dressing up in a child’s fireman’s uniform.
I do think it’s awesome they’ve had the guts to build an honest to god electric coupe and not some boring cookie cutter crossover – that’s exciting to me. I hope it sells well so there will be more choice for enthusiasts. Just offer a “FCES Delete” option, please.
I wonder if it noticeably fake? Kinda like how you can tell live music compared to a speakers system. Really easy to hack. Just record your own flatulence, switch out the input to the speakers, and blow your neighbors away.
Just like with the death of physical media to digital/steaming and phone keyboards to touchscreen, it’s going to take time to drag people kicking and screaming against progress. I’m sure they’ll eventually find some other way to piss their neighbors off.
That was an inspiring read, thanks Jason.
I feel like this thing would be awesome as a standalone unit for sim racing.
“Fratzonic Chamber” sounds like some bs weapon out of the Freakazoid cartoon
Bass shakers on the frame and transition line speakers in the fake exhaust. Sounds dumb to me, but both system have been prevalent in audiophile setups for years. The amplification for those speakers is whats new. Class D amplifiers make it possible. Their efficiency is about 95% compared to an A/B amp that is about 60% efficient. I am curious what the sensitivity of the speakers are and how they got that 127 number because 127db is loud. That EV battery pack sure would produce enough amps to power any setup they wanted though.
> dumb
> audiophile setups
Yeah
Attack of the Fratazoids? Wasn’t that a sci-fi porn film?
So you’re saying that this is a vibrator for dicks?
Really the new Mustangs and Camaros locally shift 3 times to get to 45mpg and sound like they are running wide open throttle. Makes it sound as if they have maybe 40 horsepower with all that noise and so little movement, like they did a leaf blower engine swap.
I’m not really a fan of the synthetic exhaust noises but at least they’re from the factory I guess?
Borla makes an ‘exhaust’ now for the Mach E.. it’s expensive for what amounts to a speaker system you mount under a bumper.
I just saw an ad for the borla exhaust and thought it was a joke. Had to google and was blown away to find it was real. It’s just so stupid.
I recently got my hands on a BMW i4 M. Doing mischief in parking lots with no engine noise lets you have a lot of fun without attracting attention (allegedly).
That’s pretty high on my list of cars to lease if I get a unreasonably high paying engineering job anytime soon.
It might be worth stalking used ones as well. Very nice examples are showing up in the $40kish range and still dropping. It’s the first EV that I’ve genuinely loved. Good luck on the job hunt.
As a longtime admirer I think your writing is getting better and better. That has nothing to do with the piece, other than I really enjoyed it. And I appreciate you!
Like inventing AI, and then using it to do fun things like make movies and art, freeing up humans to concentrate on our day jobs moving things from inbox to outbox.