Dodge muscle cars still three years away

Fiat Chrysler Automobiles Australia's ambitious plan to have Dodge’s iconic V8 muscle cars built in right-hand drive for release Down Under as early as next year has been shelved, and Australian buyers will now have to wait until 2018 at the earliest to put their money down on either the Challenger coupe or Charger sedan.

FCAA President and CEO Pat Dougherty, told motoring.com at yesterday's launch of the 2015 Chrysler 300 that the business case for RHD versions of Dodge's existing Challenger and Charger models was no longer viable.

“Right now, the timing is a little difficult," he said. "We had a business case that said we wanted to bring those products to the market, but the cars are pretty much maxed out in terms of plant capacity — so that’s the first challenge we have.

"The second challenge is that with the Aussie dollar dropping down, it deteriorates our financial position in the business case.

“So were in a hold position right now.”

Dougherty said that FCAA would re-visit the high-performance Dodge pair once the new-generation models are ready to roll in 2018, and that it will ask FCA to engineer RHD versions from the outset.

“Clearly, in the next generation, we’ll be on up-front in the early parts of those conversations, so we’re not included after the fact [as with the current models] saying, ‘Hey can you make it in right-hand drive?’.

“We’ll be asking to make it RHD, [so that FCA only needs to ask] ‘How many can you sell?’”.

Dougherty said that the costs associated with engineering the new models for RHD would make it more viable.

“When you do it from the beginning of a product plan, it’s less expensive on the per-unit basis than if you do it after the fact. If you do it after the fact, you’ve got to go back to all your suppliers and say, ‘Can you flip the mould, so the Challenger cockpit goes like this instead of like that’.

"Those things get a lot more expensive after the fact, because then you’ve got to go get more tooling, more resources, more racks and more pins on the assembly line, because you’ve got to have it easy for people assembling the vehicles to install. You have to do all those processes, and it’s an engineering investment.”

As we reported in April, one of FCA's top global product planning executives, Steve Bartoli, visited Australia to explore the options for broadening the company’s range of products here, including Hellcat versions of the Dodge muscle cars.

Meanwhile, Australians will have to make do with existing high-performance models from Chrysler and Jeep – the 300 SRT and Grand Cherokee SRT respectively -- for another three years.

A 2015 model facelift for the 300 SRT Core and Platinum sports sedans will arrive here in September, featuring similar improvements to the 2015 300C and 300C Luxury released this week, plus a boost in power and torque figures.

Dougherty said that despite the reservation of the high-performance SRT badge only for the Dodge brand in the US, the popularity of the existing 300 SRT will see it continue exclusively in Australia.

“We look at SRT [in the USA] as being high-performance, and staying with Dodge. We don’t have that in Australia. We are one of the biggest SRT markets in the world — we sell more SRTs than they do in China or Japan or other markets around the region.

"We showed them the business case with the 300 SRT going forward, and they said ‘Absolutely, we’ll support it’. There was a little more engineering that had to be done on that car to get it tuned right and that kind of stuff, and that’s why its [arrival is] a little behind the other 300 models.”