Dodge Boss Says EVs Will Keep Muscle Cars Alive

• Tim Kuniskis, head of Dodge, calls the current era the new “Golden Age of muscle cars.”

• Hellcats won’t be available forever.

In fact, Kuniskis calls the electrification of the automobile “Performance 2.0”. In the present, however, no brand is more synonymous with V8 muscle, superchargers and powerfully loud exhaust notes than Dodge. Moving forward, the big petrol guzzlers will be retired but not all will be lost.

Nothing of what Tim Kuniskis, head of Dodge, told CNBC is actually news. For years now, we’ve seen and experienced numerous EVs that are capable of massive performance, some of which can match and even surpass the highest-output versions of FCA’s massive-power supercharged 6.2-litre HEMI V8 engine.

Kuniskis said: “The whole world is going to shift to electrification, right? We know this is coming,” he said. “The whole world’s going get there and when it does, the price point of that technology is going to come down, and … the crazy people are going to take the electrification that has now become accessible from a price point and make that performance-based instead of economy-based.”

Many of us auto critics have quipped that FCA and Dodge are ignoring the electrification of the automobile as they are late to the game. The Pacifica hybrid and a pair of 4xe PHEV Jeeps essentially round up what’s available from FCA in North America, or soon will be. The newly-formed Stellantis will surely change this before long.

“1972 was the beginning of the end of the Golden Age of muscle cars,” Kuniskis said. “They went away for fuel economy, for the oil crisis. They went away for safety. They went away for insurance, and they went away for increasing emission standards. It’s kind of crazy to think about we’re getting close to a similar list of things right now.”

History indeed seems to be repeating itself.