During my recent trip to the US I rented a Dodge Charger 3.6 for the fun of it to see if regular American cars made any progress in terms of development. Here are my findings:
- the car's engine is lazy as usual with good torque at low rpm but the fun stops there!
- the suspension is soft as expected and has good cushy ride on the highways
- the transmission (6 speed auto I think), we acceptable but not particularly fast
- fuel consumption, returned about 30 MPG+ (according to the onboard computer)
The strange thing about this car is that knowing full well that in the west coast of the United States you can easily get RON87 fuel which is super low grade by developed country standards. The car's engine started knocking at 4,500rpm using RON87. I would think that Dodge would design the engine to run efficiently on RON87 since it is a common fuel in US.
I had the chance to dyno test the car to see how much power it would produce at the wheels, to my surprise the 3.6 litre engine only managed 191hp at the wheels which is very low. I would imagine that the transmission would have sapped out about 25% but 191 hp is very low.
The car felt clumsy to drive around the city but was comfortable on the highway. I am not sure how much worst it was before this but in terms of car development the average American car is nowhere near the Europeans or the Japanese!
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