'06 Charger: My Review

I'm on vacation in Arizona, which is nice, 'cause it's fifteen below
zero and snowing at home. Our rental car (from Enterprise) is an '06
Charger. Having lived with it for a week and 800 miles now, I must
report that I don't like it, partly because of what's entailed in it
being a new 2006 car, and partly because it is this *particular* car.

Too many controls aren't well thought out. The cruise control is on a
*stalk*, which is a giant step backward. Chrysler was among the first
to put the controls on the steering wheel when they went to the
Accustar column in '90. That was an enormous improvement over the
previous stalk location. Now they've removed them from the wheel and
put them back on a stalk. On their *own* stalk, which occupies the
space normally reserved for the turn signal stalk, displacing the
latter downward at a bizarre angle and into a bizarre position so you
have to grope for it. The cruise stalk itself works OK as a control
device, but it should've been put on the right, somewhere in that vast
plain left empty by the ignition switch's dashboard location.

The turn signal stalk, meanwhile, controls the signals, headlight beam
selection and the windshield wipers, but not the parking and headlamps,
which are on their own rotary switch on the dashboard. Nothing too
grossly objectionable here, I guess, but it's a bit of a nonstandard
grouping. And the beam selection is achieved by pushing the lever
forward for high beam, pulling rearward for low beam, or pulling extra
rearward for high beam flash. That's how Japanese cars do it, so it
must be better, right? (wrong!)

The car comes equipped with about seventy percent of the average
Buick's Nanny Buttwiper devices; five minutes' effort with the glovebox
manual and the ignition key shuts off some of them (auto lock, auto
unlock) but not others. It's still too much. This car has hyperactive
IP warning lamps and chimes. Start the engine before fastening your
seatbelt, and the seatbelt light blinks and the chime sounds for the
Federally-mandated 7 seconds...and for five seconds every fifteen
seconds thereafter. Go ahead and buckle in, and *Chime!*.
Congratulations, you fastened your safety belt all by yourself.

Start the engine with belt fastened but take the car out of Park before
releasing the parking brake, the brake warning lamp flashes urgently
and the chime sounds. Release the brake, and *ChimeChime!*
Congratulations, you released the brake all by yourself.

The parking brake itself is a pedal type unit, with a hand release. The
pedal itself feels as if it's connected to nothing at all. Put your
foot on it, and it flies to the floor. It holds the car OK, not as well
as others I've used. At least it's not one of those obnoxious
kick-to-apply, kick-to-release types or the import-copycat spacewasting
hand lever.

Sometimes you get a *Chime!* or *ChimeChime!* for no apparent reason.
Congratulations, you're super!

The accelerator is a spring-loaded dimmer switch mechanically connected
to nothing at all. Feedback, there is none. Also, when using the cruise
control, the pedal stays at the idle position. Want to speed up just a
little to pass another vehicle? Sure, but you'll have to grope around
through the accelerator's travel to find the point past which
additional
acceleration happens. It would've been a simple matter of programming
to move that point to the top of the accelerator's travel when the
cruise is engaged, but they didn't. Instead, they spent their time
carefully programming the drive-by-wire so that if you blow your nose
towards the accelerator with the transmission in gear, the force of the
booger landing
on the pedal causes the car to lurch. Vroom vroom! Powerful
acceleration feeling, vroom vroom! I'm sure it makes for impressive
test drives, but it makes parking garage maneuvering spastic and
difficult to control. The cruise control continues this theme; the
"resume" function causes the car to lurch (charge?) ahead with needless
alacrity and a jarring and noisy downshift. A more gradual return to
the previously-set speed would be more appropriate.

The horn is all the way in the middle of the steering wheel, coincident
with the airbag cover. Not a good place. The wheel itself is well
shaped, so I guess that's something. The window lift switches are
halfassed in that someone somewhere in the chain of command specified
intuitive rear-hinged switches (push down to lower the window, pull up
to raise).
Fine idea, poorly implemented. There's nothing intuitive about the feel
of the switches, and they are all crammed together. You have to look
down at them to get the correct switch and operate it properly, and
even then, if it's the driver window you want lowered, there's almost
no detent at all between "down" and "auto down", so frequently the
window drops out of sight when all that was desired was a 2" air gap.
The door lock switch is OK, but the manual door lock knobs in the rear
doors are at the *rear*, not the front, of each door. They cannot be
reached from the front. Sure, yeah, they're power, so what? Sometimes
it's necessary or desireable to unlock *one* rear door without futzing
with the power buttons. Or, for that matter, to look through the
nearest window to check if the doors are locked or unlocked. You cannot
see the rear lock buttons from outside.

The gauges are the trendy electroluminescent (or
faux-electroluminescent) black-on-white variety, and they're plenty
legible, though automatic cars still don't need tachometers. There is
no way to turn *off* the IP illumination, only to make it more bright
or less bright. Um...yeah, thanks, you're right, I didn't really want
to turn 'em off; if I had really wanted to, you would've let me.

The ignition key, as previously mentioned, is in the dash, *almost*
where it belongs. You have to insert it at about a 10:30/4:30 angle;
the "run" position has the key vertical. This isn't a major irritant,
just a minor one. What's a major irritant is the *huge* delay between
turning the key to "start" and having the starter engage. I'm not
talking microseconds
here; if you insert-and-twist-to-start, there is time for the
hyperactive chime to go *ChimeChimeChime!* (or for you to sit through a
long second and a half's silence, depending on the chime's mood) before
the starter engages. I do not know or care why this is done, but I do
know it doesn't have to be that way, and that it shouldn't.

The fast windshield rake angle seriously restricts the view outward and
causes the rearview mirror to obstruct far too much of the important
part of the forward-rightward view when I adjust my seating position
for proper vision to the sides and rear. Lower the seat so the rearview
mirror no longer is such an obstacle, and sideward/rearward visibility
is
proportionally hampered. I take especial care to adjust all the
adjustables to fit me when I get in a car not my own, and even so, a
two hour highway drive left me cramped in the leg, ankle, left shoulder
and neck. And I'm right smack in the middle of average height! Body
fixtures and interior materials are somewhat better than they were in
the Chrysler products of the early '90s. Legroom's acceptable for a
6'5" passenger.

NVH is at about the same level as it was in my 1992 4-cylinder LeBaron
sedan, which is unacceptable given the interceding 17 model years'
supposed advances since my '92 was designed, and the fact that my '92
had almost 150k miles on it when I bought it, while this car had 953
miles when I picked it up. The power steering pump or something else
under the hood puts out a constant buzzing, grinding whine that changes
pitch with engine speed and is audible inside the car with all the
windows up. H'm...the P/S pump and
other engine-driven accessories on my '65 Valiant were silent. Ditto my
'91, and my '92, and my other '91, and my other '92, and my '62, and my
'89, for that matter. What happened? I've heard this noise on too many
other new and recent Mopars to dismiss it as a one-off.

The V6 engine has adequate acceleration, with a Taurus-like warbling V6
engine note that I find very offputting. I don't like V6s.
Unfortunately, I find the rest of the car so unpleasant that even the
substitution of a largely-pointless V8 engine wouldn't make me like it.
It is not fun, relaxing, comfortable rewarding or easy to drive.

I could grouse a fair bit about the car's lighting system, but I'm on
vacation and deliberately not thinking about car lights.

All in all, I give the car about a C/C+.

 

Did you find that the door sill was too high? (ie could you
comfortably rest your arm on the door sill with the window open?) Did
you feel like you were driving a submarine?

Do you have anything else to say about exterior visibility?

Wind/road noise at highway speeds?

 

<<The horn is all the way in the middle of the steering wheel,
coincident
with the airbag cover. >>

So can you just bash on the pad and honk the horn or is it a button or
bar? I know I always instinctively just reach up and try bashing the
middle of the wheel when I want to honk a horn so if it does this I
certainly wouldn't call that a flaw.

 

In the 6 days of ownership, how many times did it need to go back for
repairs?


ok ok kidding!!

 

You pretty much nailed it. I just spent last week with a Charger rental as
well and was not impressed at all. I hate the cruise control stalk on this
thing. The performance (if you want to call it that) was seriously lacking
even for a V6. My rental had about 7000 miles on it. The car looked cheap
inside. I couldn't see the turn signal stalk as DJS mentioned...bad
location. Seats not comfortable. Factory stereo was OK. Everyone thinks
it was a hemi I suppose because I had everyone trying to stoplight race me.
Obviously they couldn't tell the difference visually.

I have a 2002 Dodge Intrepid ES with that 3.5 V6. My Intrepid is better
looking in and out than this new Charger.

=====================

 

Hmmm, don't recall old Hondas doing it that way, although old Toyotas
did it that way.

A rental car with an owner's manual in the glovebox? Wow.

 

My 84 Accord was that way. I never liked it. My 06 Sonata is also that
way and I STILL don't like it. Somethings Japanese would have been
better left uncopied by the Koreans.

My Chrysler minivan rental last summer had the manual in the glove box
still in the shrink wrap. I immediately corrected that problem!

Matt

 

See it in Europe pretty often, and I doubt we're more honest on the whole.

DAS

For direct contact replace nospam with schmetterling

 

That is because they don't do it that way.

*************************
Dave

 

Why? It is a 250 HP V6 on a RWD car. It doesnt sound too bad.

What about the car's handling? That's more important interior design
decisions.

 

Is that a trick question...? I'm sure you have your own list of likes
and dislikes.

Not if the shitty design decisions, lousy ergonomics, ill-conceived
controls and poor outward visibility make the car repellant. It handles
OK for a car of its size, neither abjectly poorly nor
outstandingly...so what? Being rid of it is the _only_ part of the end
of this vacation I'm looking forward to!

 

The sill is rather too high for one's arm to rest comfortably on the
sill for any length of time -- if you adjust the driver's seat high
enough that this becomes (marginally) possible, your forward visibility
is chopped off by the windshield's header panel and your
forward-rightward view of street signs, businesses you might be looking
for and pedestrians about to behave stupidly is blocked by the rearview
mirror.

Not really, just a not-very-thoughtfully-designed car.

The usual rearward-visibility problem exists due to the trendy wedge
shape with the deck lid plane way up in the air. Those oddly-shaped
rear door windows don't hinder outward vision nearly as much as they
look like they would.

As mentioned previously, about the same as my '92 LeBaron sedan
(Spirit/Acclaim type car) for any given road surface. Maybe a tetch
quieter. Not much wind noise, but plenty of road noise. And on this
1700-mile-new, still-got-its-paper-temporary-licence-plate example,
there's a front suspension rattle that reminds me of when the sway bar
bushings would go away on my '92.

Finest precision German DaimlerChrysler blah blah bullshit.

 

I would, and I do, because it means you actually have to reach for the
horn; no button falls naturaly to the thumb of your
properly-positioned hands on the wheel. And it also means your hand is
more likely to be blown forcefully into your face when the airbag
deploys. The consequences of that happening can be fatally severe.
Consider: One of the techniques they teach you in any basic
self-defence class is to shove your palm upwards into an attacker's
nose, driving his nose bone like a spear into his brain.

 

Not at all. I cant imagine why anyone would hate V6s.
IMO V6 offers a good compromise between economy (4 cyl)
and power (8 cyl). Or is it the "V"? There exist H6 engines.

 

Timothy J. Lee wrote:
\

Why the surprise? Almost every rental I've had in the last 15 years has
had a manual in the glove box.

 

That mirrors my experience with two rental Magnums. Visibility rearward
is FAR better than the size of the windows would make you think. All in
all, the Magnum sounds vastly superior to the Charger interior-wise. I
would own a Magnum in a heartbeat, but the things Dan mentioned about
the Charger (especially the column stalk stupidity) would put me off in
a hurry.

Again, the Magnum seems vastly superior. It was far quiter (wind, road,
engine noise) than my wife's LH car.

One of the early magazine reviews of the Charger did say that there were
deliberate design decisions made to keep it cheaper than the Magnum and
300, such as "flapper" exterior door handles instead of the more solid
"handle" type, cheaper interior appointments, and a deliberately louder
exhaust on the Hemi. Sounds like they got a bit carried away.

But even then, I'd say that the Magnum's interior, nice enough as it is,
is very "austere" compared to most American cars. A lot of hard lines,
hard plastic, and an all-around "cold and uncomfortable" feel. Kinda
like a Mercedes :-/

 

All those are good points of a V6. Add also acceptable smoothness
(though not as good as an inline 6) and compact size. But you CANNOT
make one have a good exhaust sound, no matter what you do. The best
option is to muffle the damn thing as much as possible, because the
louder they are the fartier they sound. V8s in contrast have a nice deep
unobtrusive burble that doesn't get more offensive as its allowed to get
a little louder, provided that you muffle the high pitch components
enough to prevent it from getting harsh.

I say this as an owner of both v6 and v8 engines.

 

Hi...

Gosh, the a big horn button in the middle of the steering wheel.

The ignition key in the dash.

Now all that's needed is for someone to invent a big half-round
rubber ball on the floor that we can push with our left foot
when we want to wash the windshield

Add vent windows and we'll be all set

Take care.

Ken

 

You forgot a big chrome horn ring.

nate

(I guess that wouldn't work with an airbag, would it?)

 

Ditto.