The electric car is killing an era. And not even the great symbol of the combustion engine is spared

Something is changing in the car industry when the latest Dodge Charger in the brutal SRT series is an electric with artificial exhaust pipes. The end of an era of huge V8 engines, fired consumption and harsh roars. The giants of the American sports car industry have succumbed to electric, and there is no turning back.

While in Europe we flirted in the 70s with models like the Renault 5 (which will soon have an electric variant) and the Ford Fiesta, in the United States they mounted eight-cylinder blocks in every sports car that came forward. Cheap gasoline, a public hungry for power and various odes to excess they made models like the Ford Mustang, the Dodge Charger or the Chevrolet Camaro come to life.

No one resists electrification, not even muscle cars

It is ironic now that, while in Europe we point to 2035 as the end of diesel and gasoline cars, in the United States are advancing this date just two or three years from now. Ford, Dodge and Chevrolet, manufacturers that still kept their Muscle Cars alive (which can be bought in Spain without too much trouble) seem to have agreed: your sports cars must be electric.

On the part of Ford, the idea is to open the Mustang family to more general models, such as the electric Match-E. A Mustang SUV, who would have thought 50 years ago. There will always be concepts like the 1,400 horsepower Match-E but, for the moment, the ambition is more diluted.

Giants like Chevrolet, father of the Corvette and the Camaro, indicate that the Camaro family will disappear in 2025, in favor of an electric saloon. The Combustion Camaro hasn’t managed to sell as much as the Mustang and Challenger, and the move to electrification is the most viable way out under these circumstances.

The Dodge case has been the most notorious. Both the Charger and the current Challenger have a 797 hp V8, two true beasts with a sound that they wanted to replicate artificially. The new electric model not only simulates the sound of a V8 Hellcat so that we don’t forget its essence of Muscle Car, but it also has “a manual gearbox”.

This system, called ‘eRupt’, will play with the retentions and sounds of the engine to simulate the sensation of a manual transmission. In short, a display of technologies so that the buyer of this electric beast has a déjà vu of combustion.

After the Dodge case, added to the proposals of Ford and Chevrolet, the american muscle car says goodbye to an entire era of huge combustion engines. The future is electric, and not even sports cars with the most history under their belt can avoid it.