When I was a kid, I’d sometimes fill my soda cup with a little splash of everything. I called it a Suicide, though I know it has different names in other parts of the country. It didn’t taste very good, but that never stopped me, because seven-year-old me loved sugar and had no sense of taste. If I hadn’t outgrown that phase, I’d have been delighted to hear that Stellantis is doing something similar by offering a limited-time vinyl wrap for the Dodge Challenger featuring every single color from its 2023 palette. Every. Single. One.
Announced through Dodge Garage (basically an official Dodge blog and merchandise outlet), the Hi-Impact Colors wrap for the Challenger encompasses the full spectrum of colors that’ll be available on the 2023 Dodge Challenger—the last year for the venerable muscle car. They number 14 in total and include everything from White Knuckle to Pitch Black, from F8 Green to Plum Crazy. The price, as you’d imagine, isn’t cheap: $3,700 plus installation, which Dodge Garage says can be arranged at certified 3M installers.
Visually, the wrap calls to mind VW’s Harlequin Golf and Polo, which used mixed body panel colors, and are remembered today as cult classics. For a multitude of reasons, though, it’s hard to see these Challengers going down the same way. For one, this is a wrap: In no world will it last as long as a real paint job, no matter how well cared-for, so it’s never going to become a collectors’ item. It’s also just not good-looking, being a lazy sequence of stripes with no attention paid to complementary colors. I guarantee you any given street artist could’ve come up with a more exciting design.
Last but not least, I’m not sure how Challenger buyers and fans—also known as the “Brotherhood of Muscle“—would take to a rainbow-wrapped car. The only thing more out-of-touch with its customer base that Dodge could have offered is a four-cylinder Challenger—though, with the Charger Daytona EV on the way, there’s no chance of that happening. But the biggest question is if buyers will keep those yellow splitter guards on their rainbow cars. I think it’d be a good look, personally.
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