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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How long before the shitty speakers have an obnoxious rattle?
It’s not a bug, it’s a “feature”.
“I absolutely adore human beings, and I adore them because of things like this.”
Clearest self-professed proof yet that Jason is a different species.
F you people and your noisy cars only for the sake of noise! And stay off my lawn!
Username checks out…. Guessing you live in one of those 55+ gated communities too. 😛
Has anyone actually heard what this sounds like, is it really trying to replicate an ICE engine? Im ok with fake sounds but I really wish that EVs would try to ape the sounds made by like hypercar EVs rather than a rumbly V8 or something. It would still be inauthentic but it would be closer to the reality at least.
I tried to sell exactly idea as a aftermarket add-on, over ten years ago, but nobody took me seriously. Then somebody patented it and built it and now it’s the greatest thing since sliced bread. So I’ll take another stab at it: have these people realized that this is nothing more than a stereo speaker system, and that it can also play hard rockin’ music out the “exhaust pipes”?
I want the theoretical engine RPM to increase and decrease the speed at which the music gets played. Think purposely slowing or speeding up a turntable. 🙂
Open highway in front of you, Freebird queued up in your exhaust, windows down, sun shining.
You’re about to have a religious experience.
IIIIIFFFFF IIIIII LEEEEAAAVVVVEEEE HEEEEEEEERRRREEEEE TTTTTTTOOOOMMMOOORRRRROOOOOOWWWWWWWW
wouldyoustillrememberme
Just wait until your Fratzonic starts throwing CEL, as it’s part of the emissions system.
How has no one brought up the movie “The Dilemma” with Kevin James and Vince Vaughn? I guess the sound thing is more of a sub plot but it makes me wonder if car companies saw this movie and that’s what created the “theatrical audio engineering” department.
https://youtu.be/0WK6cYefv2I?si=4m1OQtN8WhZnn2Rs&t=38
I mentioned that in the comments of a prior article, to crickets, but yes, I’m with you Mike!
This is red hat levels of dumb. This is the angry face Jeep of EVs. Those little turbo whistles, spinner hubcaps, and stick on louvres from an OEM. Skeuomorphism (the word you’re looking for re: serifs and triglyphs) is fine and dandy, but this is skeuomorphic asshattery. It says “Look at me! I think it’s OK to wreck your day so someone will look at me!”, and that is literally the end of it. It’s the aural embodiment of overcompensation. I hope it dies fast, hard, and with tremendous and ubiquitous ridicule.
I need anti-Fratzonic. . . I can’t hear my clock.
Can’t wait for all the charging station takeovers.
Torch, “there’s” refers the the singular and “there are” the plural, as you doubtless know. Please, each and every time you type “there’s” pause a second to ask yourself if you’d state your evolving phrase aloud using ‘there is’ without its contraction: consider “there is dozens of colors” or, from above, “there is other ways” versus using “there are…” It’s a thing for you that no editors here seem to address. I’ve bitten my tongue until this article finally broke me; there’s many examples within it demonstrating both proper and improper usage (see how that is just so wrong?). With appreciation and wishes for your continued full recovery from your scary emergency surgery.
Can’t wait for the Fratzonic concept to come to the aftermarket. The Changli will be SUBLIME.
Yeah, I have no idea why this car weighed so much. Oh, wait…
Alright, a few things…
First, the pre-production one sounds kinda cool at ‘idle’, but sounds like a 1990’s racing game sound effect when revving. Lame.
Second, I sincerely this opens the door to DLC so I can make my electric Charger sound like each of the different pod racers in Star Wars Episode 1… or any ringtone of my choosing.
Third, how long before somebody hacks this to play whatever they are listening to on the stereo? Freebird? Baby Shark? Cotton Eye Joe? Imagine the horrible possibilities!
Borla is already doing this for the Mach-E, and promises to have downloadable sounds any time now.
That awkward moment when you’re driving your Mach-E X-Wing down the road and come across a Mach-E TIE Fighter…
Maybe the only way they could get me to buy it
I think what we’re missing from electric cars is feedback. That sense of character you talk about comes from feedback. We want to feel like the car responds to us and also communicates in its own way. That’s how we build relationships with our objects, they give us feedback. We don’t fall in love with anything that doesn’t feedback.
I’ve had many shitty cars, and fallen in love with all of them, mostly because I they gave good feedback. My 2004 Dodge Neon would shake so bad at 70 miles an hour that I thought it was a safety feature. I could tell through the gas pedal and transmission vibrations when my ’98 Suzuki Baleno had bled out its fluids to a critical level. Those machines were worrisome creatures but I felt like I knew them, and because they continued to defy the odds by making it down the roads thanks to my efforts, I felt like they knew me.
Electric cars don’t give me that sense of adventure, and frankly no car should give you a sense of adventure because of it might die at any time. When I think of electric cars I feel like the pedal’s never going to tell me anything. The car will just silently work until one day a push notification tells me it’s dead. I’ve never had an electric car but I can’t imagine falling in love with one any more than I can imagine loving a nice ladle.
So I applaud this nonsense in the hopes that it trickles down to a car I might one day buy in some sensible form that actually tells me something about the vehicle. Like I could see a use case where the sound of the car tells me where the battery level is, or gives me a sense of its overall longevity. There could be many other ways to connect feedback to sounds that aren’t just car goes faster, car gets louder.
Making electric cars interesting it’s going to require us to think deeply about why we like cars in the first place.
Feedback is crucial but it’s not something that can be quantified, which is why so many automakers eschew it for big numbers. Unfortunately, a lot of people just don’t understand the concept. I had a long conversation with a friend (who’s a big EV proponent) about electric sports cars when Lotus first announced the Evija. He just could not comprehend that engagement and feedback were anything more than low weight and force feedback on the steering wheel.
FWIW I’ve now owned two electric cars, a smart ForTwo and a BMW i3s. In both cases I love(d) them because they’re weird little cars, and they both provide feedback in their own way. The smart was nothing but feedback, pitching and rolling all over the place while still being planted because of the low centre of gravity (unlike the gas versions). The i3 is a much more Bavarian experience but the *feel* of what the car’s doing compared to say, my Golf, is excellent.
But I mostly love them for their quirkiness. Car-as-appliance will never do that, and EVs are one step closer to automobile-as-washing-machine. I’ve had the PHEV Toyota RAV4 as a work car, and there’s nothing less soulful. It does its job admirably, I suppose, and for that I must respect it. Nobody’s ever going to love their electric RAV4 or CR-V, though.
I think the only way for a car as an appliance to become soulful is through sheer permanence. You’ll love it if that car gets you through a few moves, some hospital runs, and never complains as your life changes around it. But even then you might only think about that when it needs a timing belt change.
Throttle feedback is all about mapping at this point, whether it’s ICE or EV. They’re all throttle by wire. Braking feedback is not really different between the two as long as you’re not in one pedal mode. Steering feedback will be the most different, but even that is changing because a lot of ICE cars now have electric steering pumps as well.
I suppose the TL;DR here is that a 2020’s vehicle is not going to drive like a 1980’s vehicle, which was never going to drive like a 1940’s vehicle.
I think what’s cool is that it feels like we’re at point where how cars will drive for the next 20 or 30 years is being figured out.
As we transition to digital cars, there are more opportunities to replace and augment the feedback we lost from more mechanical linkages. Are car companies going to lean towards uniqueness and feedback, like Dodge and Kia, or towards standardization, like Tesla and every other electric car that looks like a cellphone. I just wonder how it’s going to go. It’s probably going to be the most boring mix of the two, which is why I’m rooting for the weird shit.
This seems like a marketing department decision. They knew that making the Charger an EV was going to piss off a bunch of angry rednecks and needed to find a way to bring back some of the things that these guys like a lot and what they seem to like more than anything is drawing attention to themselves by making lots of noises. Its like the Harley guys who spend more time revving the engine than driving- just to make ” scary” noises to let others around them know they are a scary badass ( without realizing we simply think its stupid). Same with a lot of guys that drive Chargers and Mustangs. So they decided to add this sound effect so that these guys can still make their noises. Its stupid. But its probably a smart marketing idea. Can’t wait to be annoyed by these things at future traffic lights…
I wanna hear the electric car make the THX noise
EV reverse sound effects are so varied and weird, I’m always shocked when I hear one in a parking lot. Standardization (like the old beeping) would help notify you a vehicle is, in fact, reversing. But a massive THX crescendo would be fantastic!
They certainly get your attention with a, “WTF is that sound?!”
The problem is you don’t know where to look. Something was backing up the other day and my wife was looking all over like “wtf is going on”. At least if you hear a BEEP BEEP BEEP BEEP you almost instinctively know to look for a box truck or something reversing. Some strange alien warble doesn’t have the same effect.
THX (and the Deep Note) is owned by Razer (of garish PC peripherals fame). I can only hope that the Deep Note-equipped cars will also be festooned with RGB LEDs that sync to the stereo.
Wasn’t that a fad a decade or two ago?
I’ll be Grandpa Simpson in this scenario.
From the headline, I thought there may be something new or interesting in the design of the system.
I hate to keep bringing Tesla into this comparison, but I think their cars can make vroom vroom noises. What’s new about this, that they somehow turned it into audio coal rolling?
Not impressed by the vibration generators either. I’m sure those weren’t new when they were installed in the first ‘Magic Fingers’ motel bed. They’re not even new in automotive applications. I’m pretty sure these have been available since the 90’s for car audio use.
This has all the innovation of a gamer chair.
If it can actually make the driver feel something similar to the vibration of an engine under throttle, that’s the difference. Tesla’s just dumping the noise out of a speaker.
If it can’t actually do that, well… the difference is probably just a couple hundred pounds of steel and plastic.
Years ago I saw a tv video on one of those invention shows where they had a gizmo hooked to the car stereo system. You could select from dozens of different engine configurations and it would generate appropriate engine sounds based on rpm input. My brother and I instantly said we’d buy that. It’s 30 years later and I’d still buy it. I don’t want/need a honking big V8 or V12 but it would be fun to have the sounds of it.
You know, as long as it’s not absurdly expensive I’d buy that gizmo for a laugh. I’m old enough to know better, but it would still be hilarious.
This is the only way I would want to have a system like this. I don’t what whatever silly engine-like sound your marketing department came up with, let me make my economy car sound like a Viper or a Podracer or something equally ridiculous.
Fratzonic? Really?
Shouldn’t it rightly be “Fratzogic”?
It even has a hard “g”, which is much more like an exhaust than an electric-sounding smooth “n”.
Do better, Dodge!
That’s not their philosophy, and never has been.
I hope they use high quality loudspeakers in their fake exhaust.
I also hope there is a market for those speakers, and that this noise box becomes the catalytic converter of electric vehicles.
I’m old and cranky, I hate this.
I hate the kind of dick who needs to have their car be so loud you can hear it a block away. I hate sitting in traffic and there’s someone near me who’s car is so loud I can’t hear whatever I am listening to with my windows rolled up.
Some kind system that shakes the driver’s seat and pipes in noise to the headset so they can have the Disney attraction version of their obnoxious muscle car experience without disturbing everyone else? Go for it. But I know part of the appeal for the driver is knowing they are inflicting it on everyone else.
Same goes for the loud music people.
Are you me?
Back in my 20’s I was the loud exhaust/loud stereo guy.
God, I was an idiot.
Now, if you all don’t mind, get off my lawn!
I have to admit now that I’m much older I genuinely regret subjecting my parents to my loud music – not that I’m sorry for listening it to it, mind you, but the obnoxiousness of subjecting others to it. I should have used headphones.
I object to this on the basis that it is a threat to public safety.
These rattle generators are going to falling off of these cars in 3 years when the mounting holes rust. That’s some heavy road debris to be flung into highway traffic.
Everything you said in that article, sure, I get it. First question, can you turn it off? Is there a button real or on screen that I could push to shut off the sound and NVH? The “Lexus” button perhaps.
This strikes me as dumb as CVTs that have 6 “gears” for people who like the feeling of “shifting their own”.
I have a Subaru CVT with the flappy paddles and 6 “gears” to choose from. I ignore them unless / until:
They have their places, but /nobody/ I know “paddles their own” up and down through 6 gears day-to-day.
“Put down that chainsaw and listen to me…”
Whoa, was Dare to be Stupid, classic pastiche of Devo, actually Weird Al addressing Torch from 1986?
Sounds like Torch should be squeezing all the Charmin he can. Or at least putting his head in the microwave to give himself a tan.
What’s a crackle tune gonna sound like with this?
I wonder how loud it can go? Nitro DLC for the win.