Can an EV really be a muscle car?

The muscle-car makers that are retiring their gas-powered vehicles this year say they will return with EV versions. (Source: Bloomberg)

In the greatest car chase ever committed to celluloid, for the 1968 thriller Bullitt, the audience is prompted to root for the Mustang Fastback GT390 over the Dodge Charger 440 Magnum R/T. The Mustang, in a classy olive green, is as sleek and sexy as its driver, Steve McQueen, who plays the eponymous hero-cop. Stuntman Bill Hickman, playing one of the bad guys, drives the Charger, its sinister black livery echoing his suit and driving gloves, its severe lines mirroring the squareness of his jaw.

After 10 minutes of mounting tension, the chase ends with the Charger slamming into a gas station and erupting in a fireball. The Mustang careens off the road, but our hero brings it under control just before it can tip into a ditch.

The audience is meant to be relieved that the good guy wins. Me, from the first time I saw the movie in my teens and having since watched the chase sequence hundreds of times on YouTube, I’ve always regretted that the better car loses.

Not that I’d have liked to see McQueen or his wheels going up in flames — but the Charger deserved a better fate. In my entirely subjective opinion, it was the most iconic representation of an American archetype: the muscle car. At the peak of the category’s first golden era, around the time Bullitt
was made, you could argue that the Mustang and Camaro were more beautiful, the Pontiac GTO and Chevy Chevelle classier — but for brute musculature, there was no matching the Charger. That is why it was a Hollywood favorite, especially as a ride for characters, good or bad, who are meant to convey menace.

That era was long gone by the time I could afford a car, and I had neither the nous nor the nerve to buy a used ’68 Magnum: The thrill of ownership would be canceled out by the cost and complications of maintenance. When the second golden age of the muscle car came around in the mid-2010s, middle-aged caution (or just plain cowardice) prevented me from taking a chance on a brand-new, 700-horsepower Charger Hellcat. But the Charger remained the only car on my bucket list.

Alas, I left it too late. Stellantis, the conglomerate that now owns Dodge, will retire the gas-powered Charger, along with its sister badge Challenger, at the end of this year. Chevrolet will also discontinue production of the Camaro, the staple of Nascar tracks, in January. Ford is making a last stand with the Mustang, but gearheads expect the 2024 GT model, a descendant of McQueen’s ride, to be the last mass-manufactured gasoline-powered pony car.

The reasons are not hard to guess. The first generation of muscle cars was muzzled by new emissions standards in the 1970s, along with the spike in the price of gas caused by the oil shock. These days, the automobile industry is being compelled, as much by social mores as by emissions laws, to sunset the internal combustion engine, or ICE. Consumers are embracing electric vehicles, encouraged by falling prices and the growing (if questionable) consensus that they are the solution to climate change.

The muscle-car makers that are retiring their gas-powered vehicles this year say they will return with EV versions. Mustang has already launched the Mach-E, but it is an SUV.

And so, the end is nigh for the second golden age of the muscle car. Will there —can there — be a third? Automotive writer Sue Callaway says we can count on it. “There will always be demand: The muscle car represents rebellion from the boring-ness of the family sedan or SUV, and some people will always want that,” she says. Callaway, who runs Glovebox Media, a consulting and content creation firm, reckons carmakers will not long resist the temptation to satisfy that craving.

But can an electric vehicle be a real muscle car? That question is at the heart of what McKeel Hagerty, CEO of Hagerty Insurance, describes as a “holy war between those who believe in the EV and those who swear by the ICE.” For a man who makes a living from auctioning antique cars, though, he seems to favor the first group. “I like the internal combustion engine, but EV cars are a lot of fun to drive,” he says.

Hagerty points out that electric engines easily beat ICEs for acceleration — what engineers know as torque, and the rest of us call “good pickup.” That, he says, is at the heart of the appeal of the muscle car. “It’s the feeling of being pushed back in the driver’s seat when you push down on the gas: That’s not horsepower, that’s sheer torque,” he says. “And EVs have massive torque.”

But there’s more to muscle cars than acceleration. There’s an ineffable quality of wildness. “There’s something inherently visceral, even hormonal,” says Callaway. “It speaks to the ‘more is more’ American mentality.”

And then there’s the sound — as much as anything else, it is the growl and roar of a big engine that makes a muscle car. For much of that car chase in Bullitt, there’s no dialogue and no music, just the noise of two powerful cars, punctuated only by the squeal of tires. Engineers developing EVs that aspire to muscle status acknowledge that reproducing that noise is key to the driver’s experience. Mustang’s solution is to pipe in artificial sound through the Mach-E’s speakers, which doesn’t do much for authenticity. Other EV makers, including Ferrari and Jaguar, face the same problem.

Matt McAlear, head of Dodge brand sales at Stellantis, says the company is developing an exhaust that will generate the growl associated with muscle cars. Any EV the company launches “will look like a Dodge, drive like a Dodge and sound like a Dodge,” he says. But strictly speaking, EVs need no exhaust since batteries produce no gases, so this, too, may feel contrived.

Still, given Dodge’s credentials in the muscle-car space, many gearheads are holding out hope for its first EV, the Charger Daytona SRT. “I can’t wait to see it,” says Craig Jackson, chairman of Barrett-Jackson, the preeminent automobile auctioneer. “Given their mentality, I can bet it will smoke the tires.”

McAlear promises it will come with the “big, blocky, bold, in-your-face Charger look.”

Hmmm, maybe I’ll leave the Charger on my bucket list just a little longer.

Bobby Ghosh is a Bloomberg Opinion columnist covering foreign affairs.  Views are personal and do not represent the stand of this publication.

Credit: Bloomberg