Our blog-bud Eric Peters mourns the auto-destruction of a once-noble Detroit marque.

The End for Dodge?
Dodge is looking a little green around the gills all-of-a-sudden. Not just Dodge, either. Parent company Stellantis just posted “worse-than-expected” stats for the first half of this year.

“The company’s performance in the first half of 2024 fell short of our expectations,” CEO Carlos Tavares said in a statement that doesn’t quite convey the extent of just how far those expectations fell short. Stellantis’ operating income fell by 40 percent over the past six months – and “free cash flow” stands at “negative $400 million euros.”

Perhaps not coincidentally, this jibes with what is no longer available this year in all-but-one Dodge model (the Durango, which is a lingering last-call remnant) and no longer offered in Jeep and Ram truck models that used to offer it.

That being a V8 and specifically, the Hemi V8 that came to define the brands that no longer offer it.

Not that there is anything wrong, per se, with the new inline six that has replaced the V8 in the models that used to offer it. As Dodge and Ram and Jeep (Chrysler’s down to one model, a minivan, that never offered a V8) have said, the new inline six makes more power and is more efficient.

And that’s true.

The point is it’s not a V8 – and that’s a problem for brands that built their brands around V8s. Dodge especially. It’s analogous to what happened to VW when it stopped selling Beetles with air-cooled flat four engines; VW became more like all the other brands. That makes it harder to retain – and attract – buyers who wanted what those other brands didn’t offer but VW did.

This brings up a general problem besetting the entire industry, which is beginning to face real consequences for putting compliance rather than customers first. It was one thing for the latter to overlook or put up with being obliged – assuming they wanted a new vehicle – to accept seat belts and even air bags, which followed as inevitably as AIDs follows HIV. But what began as minor annoyances – and relatively trivial cost increases – has metastasized into a kind of cancer that is killing interest in buying new vehicles, not just those made by Stellantis.

As of last year – 2023 – the total number of vehicles sold in the United States had declined by 2 million, down to 15.5 million annually from the peak of 17.5 million in 2016. The figure is arguably more ominously suggestive than at first glance, too – because the population has increased by at least 10 million since 2016. If adjusted for that, the actual decline is probably closer to 3 million.

Some of that can be attributed to “the pandemic,” but that’s now more than two years in the rearview. What’s happened over the past two or three years is that a tipping point has been reached – and passed. The costs of compliance have driven the average price paid for a new vehicle to nearly $50,000 – and that was as of last year. It is likely to surge past that, this year.

As CF Lifers know—as Eric himself knows—only too well, Amerika v2.0’s power-drunk central goobermint considers this surfeit of trouble, misfortune, and woe a feature, not a bug. The carelessly-concealed bottom line here is that our FederalGovCo lords and masters don’t want Serf Class knaves driving any kind of car whatsoever—not even those feeble, useless, coal-powered Yuppie Puppie play-purties they’ve ordered everyone into, they don’t. Want/need to go someplace well outside easy walking distance from home, you cavil piteously? Work; grocery/hardware/pet supply/Big Box store; Happy Hour to chillax a while with friends (sorry, my bad, Happy Hour’s been outlawed); the kids’ Little League game; hospital/emergency room/Doc In A Box/pharmacy/dentist’s office; the gym; Gramma’s house, perhaps? Spit on your ass and slide, peasant.

Y’see, there’s a damned good reason why personal automobiles (and Harleys, natch) have long been hailed as “the great American freedom machine”—because that is exactly what they are. Unfortunately, individual freedom of movement—a/k/a the freedom to travel as, when, and where one pleases unmonitored and unmolested, empowering one:

• To schlep the fam off to the beach, mountains, or lake for vaycay
• To attend a movie, play, or concert
• To visit a restaurant for dinner out
• To grab a carton of milk, loaf of bread, pack of skid-paper, and/or bag of cat litter
• To just joyride aimlessly way out in the sticks, windows down and radio crankin’, on a pleasant early-April afternoon unburdened by twelve (12) pounds worth of signed, dated, and notarized Official Authorization Application forms neatly filled out in quintuplicate by hand (black ink ONLY, mind; use of non-black inks or pencil will result in applicant’s immediate arrest on charges of Felonious Non-Compliance, Aggravated Meandering, and/or Unlawful Insurrection, among others). Completed forms must be duly submitted and registered with the Proper Authorities no fewer than eight (8) weeks in advance of intended date of departure; sloppily penned, smudged, and/or misspelled submissions will be rejected and shipped to a local facility for recycling. Applicant may submit a new form for review and evaluation after the required six (6) month cooling-off period has passed. A lawful maximum of three (3) submissions over no fewer than ten (10) years is permitted for each applicant

—is something They™ simply cannot, will not, abide.

You think I’m only kidding about this? Hyperbolizing, exaggerating for effect? Overstating the case to make a more general point? Would that it were so, my friends. Of all the rights and liberties They hate—which is, y’know, ALL of ‘em, actually—individual freedom of movement is probably the one They hate more ferociously than any other. It gnaws at Their vitals like a horde of termites on a floor joist: keeps Them awake nights, disrupts Their digestion, leaves Them feeling all achey, listless, and out of sorts.

So Stellantis finally bites the big one after decades of struggling to comply with arbitrary, unattainable FederalGovCo standards for auto emissions, fuel economy, and passenger safety? Big fuckin’ whoop. That makes it one down, three to go for Detroit’s once-mighty Big Four, then. For A) grabby, preachifying ProPols; B) scuttling bureauweasel lickspittles; C) innumerable Überstadt Enforcement Komissariat doorkickers humping a full combat-patrol loadout, including det-cord, flash-bangs and fraggers, select-fire battle rifle plus four (4) 30-round backup mags, Level IV body armor, and helmet-mounted NODs; D) climate “science” “experts” purchased wholesale by FederalGovCo out of Ivy League credential mills; and E) miscellaneous dreadlocked, damp-drawered Eco-tard cultists whose dorm rooms (and persons) exude an emetic miasma of patchouli, cat urine, spilt beer, unwashed asscrack, high-octane sinsemilla, and rancid bong-water—seriously now, what’s not to like?

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