Dodge CEO Tim Kuniskis gave an in-depth interview to Wired.com. Here are two of his comments: "What makes a muscle car? The personality and attitude of the car, over and above the raw horsepower number. If you look at a Charger or Challenger V6, those are our volume cars. They have 300 horsepower. The look awesome, they have an awesome personality, an incredible road presence. They sound great. People love these cars and everyone would describe them as a muscle car. Now, is it a 485-horsepower Scat Pack V8 that runs 12-second quarter-mile times? Or a 700-horsepower car? No. But, it’s always been that way in muscle car realm. A 300-horsepower V6, it wasn’t that long ago that that was one of the highest output V8 you could get. Just like luxury gets pushed down, the technology gets pushed down. At some point iron block, pushrod V8s are not going to be possible. Will it be the end of performance like it was in 1971? No. In 1971, we didn’t have the technology to overcome those challenges. Today we do. If you look at Porsche 918 and LaFerrari and things like that, you see them going with different technologies like hybrid electrification. Performance will never go away in my view. How we get there will change. Will we see smaller displacement turbos? Will we see electrification? Will we see hybrids? Of course we will." "We had record breaking Challenger sales last month. We’ll have record breaking Challenger sales again this month. Hellcat is a very small percentage of what we sell in Challengers. If we show you 6,000 to 7,000 Challenger sales in a month, it’ll be a few hundred Hellcats. That’s the inherent value and benefit of a halo car. If you look back at how we launched that car and how we staggered the launch over a five-month period, you’d say “This is ridiculous. Why are they doing all this? Why are they talking about this so much? They’ll never sell that many of them, they’ll never be able to built as many as they need for the demand that they’re building for the car.” Look at the excitement that that generated. Look at all the media impressions that it generated. We went back and did the math. That launch of that car, again a low volume, small production car. It generated 22.6 billion media impressions. Translates to half a million dollars in media value. There’s the value of a halo. We did it to sell the fact that we had a brand new Challenger." Read the complete interview at: http://www.wired.com/2015/05/dodge-muscle-car-stay-thanks-much/
