First and foremost, I wish Carlos Tavares well on whatever future endeavors he will be undertaking wherever life leads him and I pray he remains prosperous. With the brand under new leadership, I hope that we will be able to see some positive changes coming in the upcoming year. However, being realistic, I don't expect the return of hellcats and Hemis anytime soon, or hopefully, EVER!!! This is not to say that I don't want to see or hear a V8 Mopar in the future, but trudging through another Jurassic Park catastrophy of big cubic inch pushrod V8s Dinosaurs is a sleep inducing rerun that I'd rather not watch. It always ends the same way with the EPA coming to kill everything and everyone being all butthurt because the adults keep taking our toys away. With the new regime in the presidential office come January and now the CEO of Stellantis now embarking on a new journey elsewhere, we have been given a bit of a reprieve but let's not be so anxious to run back to what got us in trouble in the first place. Hopefully the new CEO will have a better understanding of what the Mopar brands really need and will make the best judgement calls and decisions needed to move the brand into the future properly.
While I'm not a fan of everything that Mr. Tavares did, I will say he left behind a blueprint that can move the brand into an amazing future and really help Stellantis shape the Mopar brands to where they need to be. With the STLA platforms, Stellantis can really make some amazing models for each of the brands and with the Hurricane engines and the 880RE Gen-4 the horsepower potential is through the roof. As far as the V8 is concerned, Mopar has a few options that would allow them to stay in range of what everyone else is doing. The Mustang has its 5.0L & 5.2L V8 engines while the Corvette just came out with a ridiculous 5.5L twin turbo V8. Dodge could easily release a 5.2L and 5.6L DOHC V8 engine with the 5.6L being supercharged. For any of us that know what those engine sizes are in cubic inches, the 5.2L V8 would come in a 318cubic inches and the 5.6L comes in at 340 cubic inches. If cross town rival Ford can squeeze 526hp out of a naturally aspirated 5.2L V8, 500hp out of a naturally aspirated 5.0L and over 700hp out of a supercharged 5.2L V8, and GM can squeeze out over 1,000hp from a 5.5L V8, why can't Dodge pull similar numbers from a 5.2L DOHC V8 and a 5.6L DOHC V8? A 530hp 5.2L V8 with AWD and a 800hp Supercharged 5.9L V8 with AWD shouldn't be out of the question.
As I said before, the brands need to be back to what they should have been all along, Jeep needs to be a Jeep brand, Ram needs to be a truck brand, Chrysler needs to be a luxury brand and Dodge needs to be DODGE! Put it this way, if Chrysler brought back a 550hp twin turbo Chrysler 300M that was a modern reincarnation of the sleek sedan from the late 90s, put in on the STLA Large platform with all wheel drive and that gen-4 transmission and marketed it as a 5-series competitor and then made a coupe variant and called it the new Chrysler Lebaron with a convertible option, nobody would complain. If Chrysler took the Grand Wagoneer and the Wagoneer S and renamed them Imperial and New Yorker and gave them Hurricane powertrains, nobody would complain. Even if all four of those vehicles had EV options with the Chrysler 300M adopting the Banshee as the top tier American luxury EV designed to go head to head with cars like the Lucid Sapphire and the Tesla Plaid, No one would complain at all. Even to market them at $70K wouldn't be out of the question because they're now competing in the luxury class. There is nothing wrong with the EV market and honestly I welcome the EV market into the Mopar umbrella with open arms, I 100% am all for Mopar EVs. Just not Dodge. I'm cool with the Fratzonic exhaust system on an EV Chrysler 300M or Lebaron sports coupe/convertible or even an Imperial SUV and New Yorker SUV. Why? because on those kinds of EVs it makes sense. As I said before, Jeep really needs five models, Cherokee & Grand Cherokee (STLA Large), Wrangler, Wrangler Unlimited and the Gladiator (STLA Frame). All five vehicles should either come with the base 4Xe powertrain, a Hurricane S/O option and Hurricane H/O option. That's it. Ram needs to get back in the game with a Dakota pickup on the STLA frame platform to stomp on the Ranger and all of the other mid-size trucks. Other than that the lineup is fine. If they want to put a supercharged 5.6L V8 in to compete with the Raptor R that's fine but honestly, not necessary. This pretty much consumes the bulk of the Stellantis Mopar lineup and it does so without relying heavily on any type of V8 engine. The 5.2L & 5.6L DOHC V8 engines would strictly be for the Dodge lineup so this way it keeps the EPA at bay for awhile. The Charger Coupe & Convertible and a next gen STLA: Large platform Durango would see these powertrains but this literally only touches base on on aspect of the Dodge brand. While the 420hp Hurricane S/O would be the base engine for these three, Dodge needs more than these three cars in their lineup and I think the STLA Medium platform could help out alot in offering affordable performance that's still 100% Dodge and that is with a revised Hornet and the rebirth of the Dart. The STLA medium platform can produce an SUV the size of a Jeep Grand Cherokee Trackhawk and a car the size of an Acura TLX Type S. Drop a 270hp turbocharged 2.0L I-4 under the hood with a FWD setup controlled by a 9-speed automatic and then drop in a 214hp EDM at the rear for AWD and a system total of 484hp and you have two GLH mid-size Mopars with 392-levels of horsepower. Hopefully this new CEO will kick Direct Connection into high gear so that we can get some factory backed upgrades for these cars.
Again, the future of Mopar should be a balanced future that offers different powertrains that can keep everyone pretty much happy. No big 7-liter pushrod dinosaurs but also not going full tilt on EV and upsetting the customers and fans of the brand either. And maybe, just maybe, with a little bit of magic, maybe we could get TK back into the Mopar scene and all will be right with the world.
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