All automakers are ambivalent about it, but no brand is being dragged kicking and screaming into electrification of the industry like Dodge.
It’s not a surprise that the age of electrification would be anathema to a brand built on rumbling exhaust systems, 800-horsepower internal-combustion engines and body styles that unapologetically hearken back to the era of 50-cents-a-gallon gasoline.
But while Dodge has laid out a timeline for finally fielding its own all-electric vehicles over the next couple of years, its commitments there remain only a requisite backdrop to the brand’s full-throated participation in the here-and-now of gas-powered muscle cars. That’s the image and product-line emphasis Stellantis (then Fiat Chrysler) staked Dodge to several years ago as a way of preserving the brand, transforming it from a bland me-too marque devoted to mainstream family haulers, and Dodge has been impressive since then in continuing to emphasize its new persona.
“We said the next 24 months are going to be like juggling knives for us,” Dodge chief Tim Kuniskis told journalists this week. “Transitions are easier when they are needs-based, not wants-based. And I’ll be honest: Electrification is kind of like the world going vegetarian, and Dodge is like a burger joint. We do one thing, and we do it really well. We’re not vegetarian yet.”
Witness Dodge’s latest marketing event, a contest to select an American off the street to fulfill a one-year, $150,000 role as “Chief Donut Maker” and serve as a new type of brand ambassador for Dodge’s cars and point of view. After sifting through 173,500 applications and conducting a reality-TV type performance contest for finalists that was chronicled online, Dodge crowned a brand enthusiast and hard-driving hobbyist in Preston Patterson of North Carolina.
And Kuniskis was quick to underscore the authenticity of the contest by noting that Patterson, a legal-office employee in his 30s, had become temporarily dismayed with the brand. “He went and bought a Porsche,” Kuniskis said, “but what he really found out is he missed Dodge, American muscle, the community” that Dodge has nicknamed the Brotherhood of Muscle.
Patterson “was publicly critical of the Dodge brand, so he’s got credibility,” Kuniskis said. “It would have been way safer for us to go out and get a talking head who [toed] the corporate line all the time, but it wouldn’t have helped. We’re in a critical transition, and it’s not supposed to be easy. We’re supposed to be questioned. That’s why we need a guy like this.”
The Chief Donut Maker’s role will include participating in a host of Dodge events such as Roadkill nights, a Dodge and MotorTrend street drag-racing festival that’s regularly held in Pontiac, Mich., before the annual Woodward [Avenue] Dream Cruise in Detroit and its near suburbs.
And while the Chief Donut Maker contest is partly the kind of marketing theater at which Kuniskis has excelled, and at which Stellantis overall has excelled under CMO Olivier Francois, Patterson really will have to put up with the ambivalence or outright opposition of current Dodge fans who question the brand’s giving any due to electrification.
So far, Dodge has said that it’s going to reveal a hybrid new version of its fabled Hornet nameplate in August, in a compact crossover vehicle that is expected to share a mechanical platform with the company’s Alfa Romeo Tonale and be built in Italy. Dodge also plans to launch a battery-electric muscle car in 2024 and plans to show an electric concept this year.
Kuniskis promised that, as Dodge wends its way into electrification, its products and the brand will stay true to what Stellantis marketers and product developers have so keenly and successfully created.
“We could tell everyone to forget everything we told you about muscle cars for the last 50 years, and [say], ‘This is what you really want,’” he said. “Everyone [else] in the industry is going to be saying exactly the same thing” about their electrified vehicles. “But Dodge has never won when we follow other people.”
