I have a real hard time understanding why everyone is so cranked up about the
Charger name on this new car. Dodge has used the Charger name on almost as many
different types of vehicles as Olds has with the Cutlass name.
So where do you take styling cues from? You had the Coronet with the Fastback
roof slapped on in 66-67, then the 68-70 (the only years the Charger was a
unique model with unique sheet metal) or the 71-74 Road Runner/GTX/Super
Bee/Charger body style (same basic sheet metal that carried all the performance
names from the late 60's) or maybe the personal luxury road arks from 75-78 or
maybe they should have taken stlying cues from the FWD Omni based econo box of
the 80's (which likely sold more units than all the others combined) or maybe
the Dart Swinger with the square head lights that carried the Carger name in
South America or lets not forget the little compact car made in Australia that
had the Charger name.
There was only one constant theme with all these cars and that was they had 2
doors. Even though more Chargers were sold with 2.2 carb'd motors, slant 6's
and 318 2bbl low performance drive trains DC has focused on the performance
heritage the Charger name and will only be offering with the 3.5l v6 (an
impressive motor in it's own right) and the hemi motors.
There is no way you can make a comparison between how Ford has used the Mustang
name and DC Charger. The Mustang since it was introduced in 64 has had a single
market purpose and the style continuity flowed from 64-78 when the Fox platform
was introduced and the styling was completley differnt. Then again in 94 they
picked up styling cues from the 64-78 time from strenghtened those cues again
in 00 and now we have the 05.
Dave Clement
99 SLT+ CC 4x4
In article <d88gqq$507$1@bent.twistedbits.net>, superdak@gmail.com (Gary
Hedlin) writes:
>
>
> Chad Evans wrote:
> >
> > atleast they did a better design on the charger then they did the 05
> > dakota!
> >
>
> Umm, I disagree. If you're going to re-issue a car like the charger you
> better give it some styling cues from it's predacessors. All dodge
> really did was re-badge a Magnum in a nutshell. If you look at the new
> mustang, they took cues from many of the body styles and hit the nail
> dead on... It's deffinitly one car I wouldn't mind having!
>
> So really, when you look at the dakota is a truck that they had to do
> something with. I know some people think they should have stuck with
> the gen3, but that would have been suicide. Think about it, the gen3
> had a 8 YEAR production run. How many other cars or trucks made that
> long of a run and not have sales slip??? Not many! And when you look
> at the truck market in general, ALL the trucks got bigger and they had
> to do upscale the dakota to keep up with the trends. And they did this
> with a lot of cues from the gen3.
>
> ..so which is better, something that has NO styling cues from it's
> predacessor or something that still keeps a little of the previous
> generation???
>
>
> Gary Hedlin
> 2005 SLT 4.7 5spd
> 1998 Sport 3.9
> www.garyhedlin.com
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