How do You Make the Charger Even Better?

The days of many car companies being their own entity and not partnered up as a group or set of brands is pretty much gone.  Many companies have collaborated and brands have put together cars that are obvious team efforts to give us more of what we want; amazing cars.  Style is a huge factor today as is the need to have exceptional performance as part of a cars makeup.  Some of the most recent examples of brand collaboration come from GM with the Camaro, Corvette, CTS-V and ATS-V as well as from the Audi/Lamborghini partnership in the form of the Audi R8.

Now it seems we are going to see yet another collaborative effort and the resurgence of a name that has been gone from our car lineups for many years.  Dodge has been looking for a way to bring back the Barracuda name for years and it now seems they have found a way to do just that.  A few years ago the ‘Cuda was supposed to make it resurgence, but what we got instead was an updated Charger, which is great, but the question that was left for us is “what about the Barracuda?” 

According to the latest information that came out of the FCA meetings the Barracuda will be offered in a convertible only form (sounds like a winner already) and to give it the sports car appeal we want it to have this car will have a rear end that comes from the new Alfa Romeo Giulia to allow the car to be able to be rear-wheel drive.  This setup from Alfa-Romeo will be part of the Charger as well to add more sport and style to this already amazing sedan that we seem to love from Dodge.

Other expectations for this pair are lighter builds.  Actually this lighter build is expected to carry over to the Challenger as well to give us three amazing Dodge offerings that are built to be powerful and much lighter muscle cars.  This means the group will finally ditch the Mercedes-Benz platform that has been around for over a decade. Even though the expectations of the Dodge cars will be for them to be lighter and more capable, looking to the Giulia as the goal for the weight does not seem likely at all.  Although brining these tanks down to a paltry 3,325 pounds is highly unlikely a weight loss, performance gain with no power loss will spell out stunning figures for us to have a look at when these models are brought to market with their new looks.

Even though the new Charger and Barracuda were displayed at the meetings in Las Vegas we won’t get to see them in person until they are ready, but it won’t be too long as both are expected to be ready for production within the next two years and we will certainly see them at car shows before the enter the production phase.  Even though most news left out the Challenger from reports of changes, the expectation is we will see Dodge have its own “Big 3” in the form of these three highly regarded names from the muscle car era that will now be sportier and more capable with the benefit of the Alfa Romeo rear end performance; you have to love collaboration when it comes in a form like this.