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Dodge’s head of design, Mark Trostle, has taken to the internet to make a simple plea to Challenger and Charger owners: Please remove your cars’ splitter guards. They aren’t part of the design and Trostle, along with plenty of others, think they ruin the muscle machines’ lines.
For those (fortunately) unfamiliar with this debacle, it goes like this: Dodge slapped yellow plastic protectors on the underside of some Chargers‘ and Challengers’ front splitters to protect them during transport to dealers. A few dealers delivered the cars to customers with the guards in place, and some buyers, liking the look, didn’t remove them. Reinstalling discarded guards became a popular yet controversial mod within the Mopar community, and in the summer of 2018, the silly debate over what people do with their Dodges leaked into the mainstream online car discourse.
Now, Trostle hopes to end the discussion once and for all by siding with the remove-the-splitter-guard crowd.
“This is the final word: When we did the sketch for the Charger and Challenger, it never had yellow strips on it,” Trostle declared in the final minute of a video uploaded to YouTube by Canadian automotive journalist, Brian Makse.
“I wish they would take them off,” Trostle continued. “You’re just ruining the paint, and they say to be removed by dealer. It’s molded in, it’s there to ship the vehicle. To me, as a designer, it ruins the lines of the car.”
Dodge has sided with Trostle on the matter and will change the color of its splitter guards to a shade of violet, which Trostle hopes will end the trend.
“For the new splitter guards, we’ve introduced a new, fashionable purple color that…we’ll see if that one takes off. I hope it doesn’t. It’s purple.”
