The Chrysler Turbine’s Whine Influenced the Charger EV’s Artificial “Fratzonic” Exhaust
If there is a way to convince gas-swilling, performance-obsessed muscle car patriots a pure-electric vehicle, Dodge thinks the new Charger Daytona is it. Back when it debuted, then-CEO Tim Kuniskis boasted that the Daytona had been fitted with the largest staggered tire package ever fitted to the Charger, and called it “probably one of the widest vehicles on the road.”
Presence matters to Dodge. To hear the brand tell its story, executives, engineers, product planners, and designers decided to place performance, attitude, and sensation above environmental conscientiousness on the priorities list.
Of course, it does help satisfy looming emissions regulations that the Charger Daytona produces no tailpipe emissions. Said tailpipe exists, though, and it makes noise. The “Fratzonic” exhaust system—a synthetic soundtrack generator playing an artificial exhaust note through a mechanically functional chambered resonator and outlet pipe. Dodge invited Hagerty out to the M1 Concourse car club and road course in Pontiac, Michigan, today for a first in-person sample of the new system. Though the production Charger Daytona made its official debut for media back in March 2024, officials kept the Fratzonic mute for some months as Stellantis’ engineers fine-tuned the sound.
The results are sure to split public opinion.
First, the good. According to Kevin Hellman, Senior Vice President and Head of Dodge//SRT Product, the voice of the new Dodge Charger Daytona EV with Fratzonic is all its own—not a copy-paste of some Charger Hellcat recordings. “We recorded Hellcats and Demons, and the 426 Hemi, and actually the Chrysler Turbine car because it has that kind of futuristic whine,” he told Hagerty. “We sampled a lot of those, listened to those, broke those down, and some of them made it in. If you listen to the idle of the front side of the chambered exhaust on the Daytona, you’ll hear a very familiar cadence. That’s because it has the Hemi cadence; it’s playing basically at that same 38 hertz of the Hemi exhaust.”
Given all the influences, the intention is for the Fratzonic exhaust to sound familiar but also new. In other words, distinctly Mopar but with overtones of something you can’t quite put your finger on. Moreover, those who live to make a ruckus will delight in the fact that the team managed to imbue the Daytona with the same ear-splitting 126 decibels that the Dodge Charger SRT Hellcat manages at full tilt. That noise is largely dominated by the supercharger whine in Hellcat’s case, but in the Charger Daytona it’s a unique symphony of computer-controlled Hemi burbles and turbine whine.
What was apparently more crucial was the care engineers paid to nail what Hellman calls the “visceral experience” of a Mopar exhaust, which contributed to the Fratzonic’s roughly three-year development time. The Fratzonic system is technically sophisticated, responding to driver actions in a way that should feel familiar to anyone who has ever driven a performance internal-combustion-engine car. “It’s all of the inputs,” Hellman says. “Throttle position, acceleration and deceleration of the vehicle, acceleration and deceleration of the motors, motor speed, front and rear… It reacts. It is part of the system.
“That’s where all the tuning comes in,” Hellman continued. “You have to tune for every little thing that happens. Everyone loves those pops and burbles and everything else. How do you get that back? You’re not over-fueling an ICE engine, but there is deceleration. So how do you do that? Take the signals of the vehicle, of the motors, and give that feedback to the driver.
“It’s all of those parts of the experience that we’ve broken down. What are the little things you hear? How do you build those back up and do it in a unique way that’s special to this car, but also very Dodge?”
That all sounds great in concept. What will take some getting used to is the lack of shift points. (The Hyundai Ioniq N takes a different tack, and in certain drive modes can simulate the shifting of an automatic transmission.) Dodge considered it a no-win situation to go that route; the driver can sense that no real shifts are happening, so inserting sudden auditory “RPM” drops and rises as vehicle speed changes seemed disingenuous. It would make the Fratzonic—already sure to be contentious—more of a lie.
Instead, Hellman says, the sound just tracks with the throttle position and vehicle speed. The devil is in the details, though; our concern is that the Charger Daytona will most often sound like it’s yawning down the road, even when driving aggressively. We hope we’re wrong on that point.
Based on our first listen at M1 Concourse, there’s no real sense of drama or occasion when the car first starts up, which is a missed opportunity. The Charger just “revs” slightly before slipping into a whisper-quiet “warm idle” sort of state. On shutdown, there’s no attempt to approximate the sound of an internal combustion engine choking and sputtering to a stop. Instead, it’s just a brief simulation of turbines spooling down, which sounds a bit strange via the chambered system; too much treble gets scraped off the top to sound credible.
All that said, there are some out there who will love the Charger Daytona EV’s Fratzonic exhaust system, and we can’t fault them. It’s innovative, creative, and it doesn’t sound like other EVs.
“We had to create a character that was unique for the car,” Hellman told Hagerty. “We didn’t want to just record a sound and then play the sound.”
“This is all new. You know, when we first came up with this, like almost internally it was like, we didn’t even know who should work on it. Is it the exhaust guys? Is it the NVH (noise, vibration,and harshness) guys? Is it the audio guys? It’s everybody, right? It’s all of us, because it is so new.”
The new, pure-electric two-door Dodge Charger Daytona R/T and Scat Pack models are slated to start deliveries in the fourth quarter of this year.
That is one good looking car, and the Fratzonic sound is cool!
I wonder if I’m the only person that thinks the resources put into this faux-exhaust sound would have been put to better use improving quality, performance, or reliability?
An electric car that’s ashamed it is electric
They all should be
ANOTHER article wasted on sound-effects?