Nothing quite says “high-performance muscle car” like a popup ad for a Mopar Extended Warranty covering your whole center console. That’s right, Dodge Charger owners are now experiencing an exciting new feature: pop-up ads that appear every time the vehicle stops at a light. This garbage feature was...
Nothing quite says “high-performance muscle car” like a popup ad for a Mopar Extended Warranty covering your whole center console. That’s right, Dodge Charger owners are now experiencing an exciting new feature: pop-up ads that appear every time the vehicle stops at a light. This absolute garbage feature was spotted in the wild, take a look here.
Dodge dropped 29% in sales in the USA last year, and something tells me, this isn't going to have folks lining up to buy Chargers in 2025. Watch the free market* take care of this one.
I think that has more to do with ending production on the LX Platform Challenger / Charger tbh. They haven't quite managed to gather the same hype among domestic car nerds with their replacements as those old boats had.
Free market doesn’t work if all car brands are owned by like 5 companies and all of them agreeing to add ads.
That is why we need to regulate cooperations as well as enforce them properly.
Narrator: "It spread. A lot. Like, a lot a lot. Really you wouldn't believe how much it spread. It spread like Domino's™ all new creamy red sauce on only the freshest of dough seasoned wi---"
I thought GM foregoing CarPlay in favor of their own proprietary UI was a great way to kill sales, this is absolutely genius. Way to ensure I would never purchase your products!
DuckDuckGo offers a nice relay service; you get a duck.com email address that mails through to your regular email, but it strips out all the trackers and other bullshit. It's good for situations like that.
If we had actual regulation here this would be illegal for distracting driving.
Illegal to look at phone (I know everyone does it and isn't enforced, but still illegal on paper) but not illegal to watch this short message from our sponsors?
I hate living through a bad joke. Much rather read about this shit and laugh then wondering what the next stupid thing is.
For me right now? Mazda. They have always been enjoyable to drive, and if you look at their interiors in everything from the MX-5 and Mazda3 up to their big family SUVs, you see physical controls in the foreground and a moderately sized infotainment screen up and back. Good location for glancing at it, and not for using a touch screen for everything in the car.
I’ve been commuting in a 2012 mazda3 for several years and it’s been fun to drive and mechanically reliable. Also very fuel efficient with one of the early Skyactiv branded drivetrains.
I said that about my older reliable car. Until I was rear ended at a stop light and it was totaled. During a time that used cars were more expensive than new. (I did find an 8 year old Corolla with high miles and lots of body damage for $18k though!)
I went without a car for nearly a year. Had to buy one when my partner was forced back to work in the office.
Peeking at the used market, it's still not great where I am. Better than 2022-23 at least.
That happened to me, too. During covid pricing, I had a 1992 Ford Taurus that I absolutely loved (and hated, but that's a different story), and got rear-ended on the freeway at the tail end of 2021. Wasn't severe and the car was drivable, but insurance still totaled it. The kicker is that even though I only paid $1000 for the car, insurance gave me a whopping $4700.
I managed to snag my current 2008 Toyota Sienna for $4500 when most were going for $6-8k. It needed some work at first, but it's a solid car and serves as our family hauler and handles multiple roadtrips a year like a boss (split custody, yay 🙄).
Chrysler Corporation (Chrysler, Dodge, Jeep, Ram) was owned by Daimler (which also owned Mercedes-Benz) from 1998-2007, then operated on their own again (and spun off Ram from Dodge) until 2014 when they were acquired by Fiat, forming Fiat Chrysler Automotive (aka FCA). FCA and PSA (Peugeot) merged in 2021 to form Stellantis.
You know, I was annoyed by that when I had to pay for an out-of-warranty update but now I'm pretty happy that my car is one year too old for automatic updates.
How is a software update a warranty claim? They should be free, like a recall. Maybe a DIY option with a USB or SD card. Either that or whatever they're adding probably isn't worth the update to me.
Point of the post is that this popup ad thing has expanded from Jeep (small brand) into Dodge (large brand) from the parent company (Stellantis). What has happened in the meantime is that a bunch of other Dodge drivers has confirmed the issue is widespread and difficult to disable.
(Ope: I got fact-checked, turns out Jeep sells more vehicles per year than Dodge. I'm old, and apparently Dodge has lost a ton of market share since last I checked!
If y'all are concerned about recency, I updated the article to include more images of the popup ads, including one from as recently as 3 days ago.)
My point was, if the ads are still pushed to cars, I'm surprised FuelArc used a 4 month old reddit post as reference. Someone most have contacted Dogde, Jeep, or Stelantis for a comment on this.
Yeah, happened to me last week. I wanted to do a simple bugfix and next thing I knew I had implemented, configured and released an ad solution to our software...
They'll see the sales of the Charger tank and will conclude that people just don't want muscle cars, which is sad because in the next few years I was thinking about getting one.
This is the company that saw their North American sales dipping and responded, "let's discontinue the Challenger and Charger, our 2 recognizable nameplates that give the rest of our lineup a halo effect with our largest buying segment, that'll fix it!"
Then they brought back the Charger as an EV, which is exactly what that particular fanbase did not want to buy, at a starting price that'll make your eyes water. Now they've announced that they're doubling back and releasing a gasoline Charger, but by surprise and with no specs available in advance, as though they're panic-releasing it. It's a perfect shit show. Corporate idiocy on parade.
I'm surprised Dodge is trying this considering the thousands of memes of BMW implementing pay to use features on their vehicle ever since they added subscription heated seats.
Oh, I thought you meant a lawsuit from me. When I, a pedestrian am crossing the street with my walk signal, when suddenly, the guy at the opposite side of the intersection just starts driving at a red light because he was distracted by McDonalds. Didn't even realize his foot was on the pedal, and now I got run over.
There was an article about this few months ago and the exact same reddit post was used there as evidence of this being true. This was most likely a bug and it probably has been fixed since. If what the headline claims here was true there would be tons of videos of it happening to different people on YouTube.
I'm the world's worst journalist, but I do try! When possible, I confirm facts with multiple sources. The "news" aspect here is that they were previously on a different Stellantis brand (Jeep), and now they have expanded to another Stellantis brand (Dodge).
If you have evidence that contradicts, feel free to share.
This should absolutely be illegal, as it blocks the use of the panel until the message is closed. This is an unnecessary traffic distraction, that is bound to statistically cause issues and even accidents.
Update: the above image is older, which has some folks on social media wondering
Stelantis was reported doing this with Jeep, and now they are doing it with Dodge too. You are confusing the issue because you are misremembering the facts.
3rd paragraph:
This isn’t the first time Stellantis has pulled this sort of stunt with popup ads, either. They already tried adding pop-up ads to Jeeps
This is just another example of the shitshow Stellantis has become! It's an unnecessary distraction that blocks the use of the screen until you close the message. This is bound to cause issues and probably even accidents.
The source of my assumptions is my mind, but sure, here you go.
A Stellantis spokesperson told Fortune in a statement that “a temporary software glitch affected the ability to instantly opt out in a few isolated cases, though instant opt-out is the standard for all our in-vehicle messages. Our team had already identified and corrected the error, and we are following up directly with the customer to ensure the matter is fully resolved.”
The ad was most likely supposed to be shown once. Not literally every single time the car stops at traffic lights. Car companies may be stupid, but not this stupid.
Absolutely not. The "I'd deal with it if I get [nice thing] for less" mindset is the entire reason we're in this situation to begin with. Companies see that people will put up with it, realize data collection from that is where the real money is made, then it leaches into everything else.