Back in December of 2021 Automotive News discontinued comments on its website in favor of those on Facebook. How have things worked out so far?
Not so good, if I go by the last few weeks of posts on Automotive News’ Facebook page. Relatively few stories had any comments, and those that did typically displayed only one or two. The biggest exception to that pattern was an Aug. 16 story, “Dodge CEO to muscle car fans: Don’t panic about EVs.” The news report by Vince Bond Jr. (2023) generated a whopping 1.4K comments.
In the story, Dodge CEO Tim Kuniskis argued that discontinuing its gas-powered muscle cars in favor of EVs “is what we have to do” but that eventually “people will see that this technology can make something cool and fun. It’s probably going to sound different, but people tuning cars, making cars faster and competing against each other will not go away” (Bond, 2023).
Readers refuse to give up the sound and fury of gas
Apparently a lot of readers disagreed with Kuniskis. One of the pithiest comments was from Terrance Macyshon-Buchanan, who wrote, “Nothing, and I mean NOTHING sounds better than 7mpg. Change my mind.”
Jay Gustafson didn’t try to. Instead, he wrote: “The smell of rubber smoke and race gas fumes, along with the sound, are too big a part of the experience for me to just walk away from it. Sorry.”
Gustafson added that he thought EVs had “big negatives,” such as the “cost of producing all those batteries – not just financial cost but the impact of the mining on the environment and people. And in the end we’re just burning coal.”
A number of commentators complained about how forthcoming Dodge EVs will reportedly receive fake acceleration sounds to compensate for their quiet engines. Corey Bruck argued that “their ev muscle car sounds like a vacuum cleaner hooked up to a blow horn.”
Also see ‘Gallup finds attitudes toward EVs vary sharply by party and age’
“Yeah dodge ceo I don’t want to drive a sound exhaust imitation hellcat,” wrote Austin Lacy, who insisted that he will drive gas-powered muscle cars until “I can’t get gas anymore.” Josh Hoy argued that the government should “just make old stuff exempt from new laws and let us have our hobby. And then leave us the hell alone.”
Among the comments filtered to show up by Automotive News staff, only one was supportive of Dodge’s shift. Jose Lara wrote that “EV is the future.” Although this comment received 61 likes, it was dwarfed by some pro-ICE comments.
There are ways to transcend ‘outrage-ification’ culture
So there you have it — Automotive News’ readers have not given up on commenting despite the shift to Facebook. They just need something to rage about. Which illustrates what Tristan Harris has called the “outrage-ification” culture of social media (Johnson, 2019).
I give Automotive News credit for apparently filtering out comments that were “less relevant,” but playing censor will only go so far in helping to elevate the discussion. Here is where I think that the trade journal made a big mistake by apparently not following industry best practices for running comment threads. As we discussed here, two of those practices include:
- Appointing a “community manager” who doesn’t just function as a moderator (re: a glorified censor), but who also helps to guide conversations like an educator.
- Encouraging reporters and editors to participate in comment threads (Goodman, 2013).
Let’s apply these practices to the above story. In response to commentators who pointed to the negative impacts of mining for rare earth materials needed for EV batteries, a reporter could have referred to research that has shown how these problems are smaller than those resulting from fossil-fuel extraction, processing and distribution. And research which concludes that EVs charged by electricity produced by coal-fired power plants can still have a smaller carbon footprint than gas-powered vehicles.
Automotive News’ coverage allows EV myths to linger
Correct me if I have missed something, but I haven’t seen Automotive News fully discuss either of the above topics. That strikes me as a meaningful oversight given the media outlet’s stated mission to be the “primary source of industry news, data and understanding for the industry’s decision-makers interested in North America” (Automotive News, 2023).
Even J. D. Power has apparently done a better job of discussing the environmental impacts of EVs versus gas-powered vehicles (Blanco, 2022). Or consider what Popular Science (Hu, 2023), the MIT Climate Portal (2022) and the EPA (2023) have to say.
Could it be that the reader backlash against Dodge’s switch to EVs might have been less extreme — or at least grounded in more factually accurate arguments — if Automotive News had upped its journalistic standards, both in how it manages comment threads as well as the breadth of its reporting?
Share your reactions to this post with a comment below or a note to the editor.
RE:SOURCES
- Automotive News; 2023. “About Us.” Accessed Aug. 31.
- Blanco, Sebastian; 2022. “Environmental Impact of EVs vs. Gas Cars.” J. D. Power. Posted Sept. 27.
- Bond, Vince Jr.; 2023. “Dodge chief Tim Kuniskis says EVs won’t mean end of muscle car fun.” Automotive News (subscription required). Posted Aug. 16.
- EPA; 2023. “Electric Vehicle Myths.” Environmental Protection Agency. Accessed Aug. 31.
- Goodman, Emma; 2013. Online comment moderation: emerging best practices. World Association of Newspapers and News Publishers.
- Hu, Charlotte; 2023. “Electric cars are better for the environment, no matter the power source.” Popular Science. Posted May 26.
- Johnson, Eric; 2019. “Tristan Harris says tech is ‘downgrading’ humanity — but we can fix it.” Vox. Posted May 6.
- MIT Climate Portal; 2022. “Are electric vehicles definitely better for the climate than gas-powered cars?” Posted Oct. 13.
I think another way to view the comments is that ChryCo is going in a different direction than where their loyal buyers are. For Dodge this is more noticeable since their cars are anachronism of old platforms with increasing horsepower. [This rather than developing new models/platforms.]
My speculation is that a lot of the mfgs are going to find that all their development and promotions of EVs are still going to result in ICE sales for a long time. It could get to the point where those that went all in on EV (eliminating the ICE models) may not survive.
People will vote with their wallet no matter what the politicians, bureaucrats and tree hugger espouse.
A previous article shows recent polling about how interest in EVs can vary dramatically by age, party affiliation, education and region of the country (go here). I would imagine that the demographics of Dodge muscle car owners would be among those least receptive to EVs. That said, the Silent Generation and Baby Boomers aren’t getting any younger.
I would not be surprised if the next decade has as much competitive volatility in the U.S. auto industry as we saw in the 1920s. Some automakers will undoubtedly do better than others for a variety of reasons, some of which we might be able to predict now and some we can’t.
People will indeed “vote with their wallets” — but that goes in more than one direction. Despite some current limitations of EVs, they do have qualities that can make them a more practical choice for some folks. And as climate change has ramped up, public support for reducing greenhouse gas emissions has increased.
For example, a recent poll found that 56 percent of the public called climate change a major threat. If we continue to experience weird weather events like this summer I would expect to see that percentage go up in future years.
Jeff, I unapproved your last comment because it engages in copyright infringement. It’s okay to post a representative sample from an article but not okay to post most, if not all, of a piece. The basic idea is to give people a general sense of the story and a link to read more. I don’t know what part of the article you wanted to emphasize so I leave it to you to send in a revised comment if you wish.
Dodge’s market share dropped over 60% in the last 10 years. I wasn’t able to get market share but Chrysler brand sales are well under half what they were a decade ago. The only growth showing in their car sales is in hybrids and evs. Chryco was late to the electric game. Their market share is resembling the second tier independents in the 30s. AFAIK Chrysler and Dodge barely exist outside of North America. They have to justify themselves to Ma Stella, who has way too many brands as it stands.
Jeep and Ram trucks are what carries ChryCo. Dodge/Chrysler are limping along with a limited range of cars and minvans. The Challenger and 300 go back to platforms from when they were owned by Daimler. They make special editions to cover up the lack of investment/new developments in the car side.
I wouldn’t take too much notice of what readers might say on a facebook page. What counts is what those who are actually in the market are interested in buying. It seems the more popular an FB group is, the more it attracts the trolls, and that guy glorying in 7mpg sure sounds like one of them. Performance by all means, yeah, but neither our parents nor grandparents would be happy with 7mpg. As for gas fumes, noise and rubber smoke, so long as it’s on the strip or the circuit, guys, it has no place on the road.
Ironic that back in the horse and buggy days, noise, stink and smoke were the very things people complained about!
As for whether the move to electrics is the right thing, I have no firm opinion. Anyway I’m past driving, so I’ll leave the matter to those who still do.
Peter, the problem with Facebook trolling is that it can become normalized in other realms. So much of today’s political debate in the U.S. amounts to little more than trolling. If American democracy is going to survive, we need to get a lot better at talking through difficult issues (such as how the auto industry should respond to climate change).
Some auto media websites deal with this situation by trying to avoid “political” discussions altogether. I get why — it’s a whole lot easier for the editor — but ultimately not helpful because the automobile industry is a fundamentally political topic.
However, I do think that we should strive to “fight fair.” And so I will point out when I don’t think that commentators are doing so. Some learn from the experience; others go elsewhere. It’s sad to see people go, but in the end I’d rather place an emphasis on quality rather than quantity of comments.
And that’s part of why I appreciate this group so much, Steve. As an Australian, it has been alarming to see how the US political climate has polarized over the past decade or so. IMHO political correctness has done a lot of damage in making so many issues an ‘us-versus-them’ mentality, rather than encouraging meaningful dialogue to find a solution to today’s issues. Name-calling and blame-slinging never fixed a problem.
Back to Automotive News, wherever they draw the line on censoring their FB page, somebody will get upset. But I like your suggetion of editorial input into the comments to guide discussion. Rather like you’re doing here.
Dodge customers wish things were the way they were in 1970 (even customers not alive in 1970), with the 426 Hemi, 440 Six Pack, and the 340, but the Hemi and Hellcat can’t survive with the CAFE and emission control standards. (I frankly also wish things were still like they were in 1970 but I probably won’t be alive 10 years from now.) I question the viability of the Dodge brand and the Charger EV but am sure Ram and Jeep EV’s should do as well as future GM and Ford EV pickup trucks and SUV’s.
Gas or EV, just bring back the Fratzog !
Hagerty does a daily “Never Stop Driving” eblast written by Larry Webster. I would provide a link to his 9/1/2023 edition but it is just an email. This issue discusses this same topic of Dodge going electric. It provides some different takes from Steve on this topic. Some I found interesting:
– Comments that came from a high end dealer in a cold climate state about he has 5 EVs “bolted to the floor” (unsellable) in his showroom. All the early adopters have already bought theirs and the regular customers are too concerned about cold weather range. A prediction is made how there are likely to be big discounts coming from the manufacturers to clear the unsold EVs.
The author made this comment which does a good job of the conundrum of all this: “Change is often painful and unwanted. Are we experiencing the discomfort of change or reaching too far for something the buyers don’t want?”
I am on the don’t want side of that and, certain specific markets excepted, see the conversion to EV as a very long pathway. Additionally, the imposition of legislation that effectively mandates BEV is not considering that there are and can be alternative technological solutions.
The one roadblock to EV adoption I don’t see discussed is diversity. Please, allow me to explain.
I am a visibly transgender woman, and I live in the Bay Area. My work often takes me, via car, to Los Angeles, Portland, Seattle, Las Vegas, Phoenix, and beyond. In most of these cities, even my friends who do not need to travel for work, usually make trips via car between these cities multiple times per year. Many are also visibly transgender.
Why does this matter?
Whether you’ve got a gas car or an EV, you will have to refuel at least once between any of these cities, and you will have to do it in a small town or small city that politically might as well be Florida or Texas. I have been threatened with violence while merely pumping my gas and minding my own business: this is not a theoretical concern.
Beyond transness, think of how many small towns or even suburbs of major cities are sundown towns for Black and Latino people. I grew up in a midwestern city whose suburbs still are: a Black person pumping gas there after dark is likely to be accosted by local police regardless of wrongdoing.
Put yourself in that position: would you rather spend five to ten minutes pumping gas, or 30-60 minutes waiting for an EV to recharge?
Beyond that, the issue is housing. Most people under 40 who aren’t tech zillionaires that I know in coastal metro areas live either in less-than-ideal roommate situations in single family homes, or in apartments with no parking. In the name of “density,” cities are doing away with mandatory parking minimums on new residential buildings, but transit isn’t being improved.
In any of the above scenarios with housing: how do you charge an EV?
Finally, whether it be PG&E’s catastrophic failures and fires in California, or ECOT’s massive outages in Texas, it is apparent that our country’s electric infrastructure can barely handle incremental increases in demand for power based on a heat wave or cold snap. How on earth can it support mass adoption of EVs?
Chloe, you make good points — and I don’t see simple answers. I would note that the country is still fairly early in the transition to EVs, so it’s pretty much inevitable there will be challenges. And it’s not like people are just sitting on their hands, e.g., Biden’s Inflation Reduction Act is significantly focused on updating and expanding the country’s electric-power infrastructure. In addition, some states are clearly doing better than others in building out charging networks (here is an interesting comparison).
All that said, I would be surprised if gas-powered cars went away anytime soon because in some instances, as you note, they are still the better option. At the end of the day we still need to figure out how to deal with climate change. So if EVs aren’t going to be the blanket solution, then we need to develop other options for those usages where they 1) don’t work well and 2) there aren’t techno-fixes that could improve things.
This is inevitably a political process. Over the next decade I would hope that we see more policy debates about such issues as how to charge EVs given issues around housing costs and density.
We can talk about those issues at the macro level, but then there’s also the question of how to solve specific problems in individual communities. For example, in the city where I live there has been a heated debate about rolling back parking minimums — and it has not played out along the usual partisan fault lines.
So let’s keep talking about these issues.
To me, there’s a pretty simple answer: frequent, reliable, cheap intercity highspeed rail, and a proper, four-track, 24/7 subway system in every major metro area. If we can force the Navy to buy ships that don’t work, and force the Air Force to buy planes it doesn’t want that won’t fly in the rain, we can certainly afford it. It’s a matter of political will.
I think building out mass transit is much better than social engineering schemes to “get people out of their cars.” Here in the Bay Area, parking minimums have been abolished, tolls go up, street parking goes away…and people still drive. We have less transit service on both the MUNI and BART systems than we had in 2007, when San Francisco had 100,000 fewer residents. The same political realities are playing out in New York, Los Angeles, and beyond: regressive taxation on the working poor who’ve been shoved out of urban cores, beyond the reach of existing transit, yet still required to work there.
As a car enthusiast, I’d much rather see mass transit and intercity highspeed rail so abundant that the average commuter or traveler “gets out of their car” because they’ve found a better way to go. If we start building that transit and high speed rail now, perhaps in 20 years we can drive whatever we want, ICE or EV, because automobiles are for recreation or cargo hauling more than for daily use. That’d be nice, and I believe we can do it.
That’s a reasonable direction. The challenge with climate change is that the U.S. in particular is getting a late start in bringing down its greenhouse gases. So we need a mix of short-, medium- and long-term goals. That can get pretty messy, particularly given the country’s deep political polarization. If the future is like the past, states such as California will usually take the lead in reconfiguring their transportation system so it works better for both people and the environment.
This strikes me as a transitional moment much like the early 20th Century, where enormous changes swept through the country’s political economy and culture. Of course, how things turn out depends a whole lot on what happens electorally over the next decade. That’s a touchy subject for the car-buff media. Indie Auto has lost readers because it doesn’t put up with “climate change is a hoax” disinformation.
The hope that it will be solved with rail/mass transit is flawed except in some very specific spots. Mass transit means perpetual taxpayer funded coverage of their annual losses even after the construction is paid off. Mass transit rail proponents always point to wildly optimistic ridership to justify the initial construction claiming that the system will at least break even. They lie.
In very dense corridors it can succeed but those places are few and far between and require large network sizes to work. NYC and London are examples. One cannot discount how in most cases there is a socio-economic component to the systems of who actually rides them.
The car has won the argument because it is a private environment where one is able to chose what that environment is, who it might be shared with, and get point to point travel. That is very hard to compete against with mass solutions.
I think that mass transit can be an important part of the solution, particularly if it is aligned with land-use changes that encourage higher densities. And even in smaller suburbs like the one where I live, expanding the bus system could be helpful (e.g., my neck of the woods is far away from a bus line). That said, mass transit is only one policy tool.
For example, as a senior citizen I would very much like to downsize and move to a neighborhood where I can walk to most of the regular services I use, such as the grocery store. However, very few of the neighborhoods in my community could be classified as “walkable” — and they are the highest cost. To make matters worse, when I’ve looked at moving to smaller, more rural communities in my part of the state, their housing prices have skyrocketed because of a flood of retirees and remote workers — often pricing out of the market those who grew up in these towns.
This is an example of how the public policy conversation can get pretty complicated.
We certainly don’t wring our hands about “taxpayer funding” when writing a blank check for the F-35 which can’t fly within 25 miles of a thunderstorm, or the Littoral Combat Ships for the Navy which are constantly breaking down, or 15-30 year contracts for law enforcement surveillance tech that can’t tell a gunshot from a car backfiring or fireworks (Shotspotter), or facial recognition software that has so many false positives that the negative impact on law-abiding citizens outweighs any potential benefit, or for throwing homeless people in jail for merely being homeless (which costs more than paying for a studio apartment for them)…
We waste a ton of “taxpayer funding” on things that don’t make our lives any better at all. Why should high speed rail and mass transit be required to operate in the black when so many things that don’t have any positive impact on the average American whatsoever are allowed to operate in the red for decades?