Nothing quite says “high-performance muscle car” like a popup ad for a Mopar Extended Warranty covering your whole center console. That’s right, Dodge Charger owners are now experiencing an exciting new feature: pop-up ads that appear every time the vehicle stops at a light. This absolute garbage feature was spotted in the wild, take a look here.
Welp, my days of not buying Dodge cars seem to be coming to a middle.
Fuck this made me giggle
For that rhyme you deserve a nickel!
Better than a twisted nipple.
You sure? Sounds like a nice tickle.
Be careful, it might be illegal to not buy one.
Damn, I would be pissed if my car started showing ads. I hope this enshitification doesn’t spread.
Dodge dropped 29% in sales in the USA last year, and something tells me, this isn’t going to have folks lining up to buy Chargers in 2025. Watch the free market* take care of this one.
*Unless you’re Tesla, in which case the market costs $277 million to purchase.
I think that has more to do with ending production on the LX Platform Challenger / Charger tbh. They haven’t quite managed to gather the same hype among domestic car nerds with their replacements as those old boats had.
Despite their reputation, the LX platform was serious value, offering stupid power for cheap. It had the “classic American muscle car” vibes, and responds nicely to modifications.
Their new $85k Charger will surely save them…
Hornet, Journey, Charger. That’s it. Hornet is a piece of cheap, charger has ads. Journey…?
Free market doesn’t work if all car brands are owned by like 5 companies and all of them agreeing to add ads.
That is why we need to regulate cooperations as well as enforce them properly.
Narrator: “It spread. A lot. Like, a lot a lot. Really you wouldn’t believe how much it spread. It spread like Domino’s™ all new creamy red sauce on only the freshest of dough seasoned wi—”
*car crashes*
I thought GM foregoing CarPlay in favor of their own proprietary UI was a great way to kill sales, this is absolutely genius. Way to ensure I would never purchase your products!
Took my Dodge vehicle in for service. They wanted my email address “so they can get in touch with me if I don’t answer the phone.” I gave it to them.
It took less than half a day for the first spam mail to hit my inbox.
DuckDuckGo offers a nice relay service; you get a duck.com email address that mails through to your regular email, but it strips out all the trackers and other bullshit. It’s good for situations like that.
Mozilla has one too. And Fastmail. You can invent a different email address for every site, then block the ones that get spammed.
Use addy.io and support an open source dev!
Pro-tip: Fastmail integrates with 1Password to generate random emails and save them.
Also with bitwarden!
…do you not have a fake email you can log into?
I bet someone has “anyoneemailingmeisacunt@gmail.com”
Actually tried it, seems like gmail doesnt like swear words
They really don’t make them like they used to.
adds Dodge to the no buy list
Which one is NOT on that list?
For me right now? Mazda. They have always been enjoyable to drive, and if you look at their interiors in everything from the MX-5 and Mazda3 up to their big family SUVs, you see physical controls in the foreground and a moderately sized infotainment screen up and back. Good location for glancing at it, and not for using a touch screen for everything in the car.
I’ve been commuting in a 2012 mazda3 for several years and it’s been fun to drive and mechanically reliable. Also very fuel efficient with one of the early Skyactiv branded drivetrains.
Public transportation subscription.
You’d may as well run the red light
That was my idea as well. You are providing a negative feedback for following the rules.
Forget about just the web. Modern tech is about to become unusable due to ads.
We need root on our car computers.
It seems like displaying an ad at a stop light would be a safety issue since it makes it so you can onky look at the screen while moving.
Not to mention it has the potential to completely distract the driver when the light turns green and other traffic starts moving again.
Oh, look…!!
Yet another good reason I’ll not buy a new car. 🙄
Perfectly happy with my current 03 model thank you…
Seriously! My 2003 has a CD player and a tape deck
😂 🤣
Yeah, mine did too…
I updated the “entertainment deck” to a unit with aux, usb, sd card, and Android Auto (which is what I really wanted).
All good!!
Is that an 8-track tape deck? 😉
My ‘15 car is amazing except for the fact that it only has slow-ass laggy Bluetooth and NO AUX JACK
The removal of 3.5mm jacks with no simple, universal, physical way to connect an audio device has been such a thorn in my side.
Narrator: And that’s when he hit a speed bump, and the whole engine just fell out.
I said that about my older reliable car. Until I was rear ended at a stop light and it was totaled. During a time that used cars were more expensive than new. (I did find an 8 year old Corolla with high miles and lots of body damage for $18k though!)
I went without a car for nearly a year. Had to buy one when my partner was forced back to work in the office.
Peeking at the used market, it’s still not great where I am. Better than 2022-23 at least.
A wreck like that is my one fear…
Doesn’t take much of a hit to “total” an older vehicle like that. 🤷♂️
It really doesn’t. I also dislike the fact it can be more difficult to find some parts for older cars too, so even if you wanted to salvage, it may not be viable.
Haven’t run into the “finding parts” problem…
That may be a regional feature though. Driven older vehicles my whole life and never had too much trouble finding parts… even from junk yards if necessary.
I have many junk yards within 50 miles, most within 20. 🤷♂️
And I’m familiar with local/online companies that provide NOS as well as new fab for older vehicles.
I am so happy that my car doesn’t update itself automatically
You know, I was annoyed by that when I had to pay for an out-of-warranty update but now I’m pretty happy that my car is one year too old for automatic updates.
How is a software update a warranty claim? They should be free, like a recall. Maybe a DIY option with a USB or SD card. Either that or whatever they’re adding probably isn’t worth the update to me.
Two weeks ago it was Jeep. Now it’s Dodge. This is how it creeps. Are both those companies owned by Crystler?
It’s called Stellantis now.
Oh yeah I did hear that name recently
Yeah, zero surprise seeing this happen to Chrysler/Stellantis cars first.
Yes, along with Ram pickup trucks and IIRC Fiat, somehow.
Plus Peugeot, Citroën and Opel.
If this ever happens to any car I buy, it’d be going right back to the dealer.
I bet you might have a court case if you could prove that the dealer had disabled this advertising “feature” during your test drive.
I would drive it straight back into the dealership through their display room window.
No you wouldn’t.
Of course he would. If he stopped outside he’d have to watch another fucking ad.
Is this your first time on the Internet? Welcome!
You do realize this is based on a almost half-a-year old reddit post? What has happens in the meantime?
Note to self, never buy a Stelantis car. Not that I have ever considered that anyway!
4 months is “almost” half a year, I guess.
Point of the post is that this popup ad thing has expanded from Jeep (small brand) into Dodge (large brand) from the parent company (Stellantis). What has happened in the meantime is that a bunch of other Dodge drivers has confirmed the issue is widespread and difficult to disable.
(Ope: I got fact-checked, turns out Jeep sells more vehicles per year than Dodge. I’m old, and apparently Dodge has lost a ton of market share since last I checked!
If y’all are concerned about recency, I updated the article to include more images of the popup ads, including one from as recently as 3 days ago.)
Jeep sells more than twice as many vehicles per year as Dodge. They are not the “small brand.”
Makes sense. I was surprised that Jeep was referred to as the “small brand”.
Yeah, maybe 50 years ago but with the popularity of SUVs Jeep is dominant at Stellantis. They sell almost as many Wranglers as Dodge sells vehicles in total.
seems like 80% of people are off road cosplayers these days.
So I drive a Bronco that’s 99% stock. I have a roof rack that I added. I do go offroading, but we also have it to tow behind our motorhome since the bronco is flat towable.
I ran into this guy who’s in a new (last 5 years), heavily modded Wrangler. He has the fenders cut away, huge winch on the front, etc… I ask him if he has any favorite spots around here and he says “nah I don’t really get out and do that anymore.”
I’m glad people are made aware of it!
My point was, if the ads are still pushed to cars, I’m surprised FuelArc used a 4 month old reddit post as reference. Someone most have contacted Dogde, Jeep, or Stelantis for a comment on this.
Someone most have contacted Dogde, Jeep, or Stelantis for a comment on this.
A Stellantis spokesperson told Fortune in a statement that “a temporary software glitch affected the ability to instantly opt out in a few isolated cases, though instant opt-out is the standard for all our in-vehicle messages. Our team had already identified and corrected the error, and we are following up directly with the customer to ensure the matter is fully resolved.”
Where are others confirming this? Not in the article.
Im in a challenger every week and have never seen an ad on the screen ever.
Is your Challenger using the dealer installed SiriusXM? That would be for new and CPO vehicles. That seems to be what it is linked to.
Y’all are… surprisingly hard to persuade! I thought sharing a literal image of popup ads in the car would be the proof y’all needed to believe it was happening.
I mean, there are… more images of it happening…? Like, damn. Here’s an instance of it happening in a Challenger.
Y’all are… surprisingly hard to persuade! I thought sharing a literal image of popup ads in the car would be the proof y’all needed to believe it was happening.
people are being rightfully skeptical of an auto news site using old reddit posts to promote themselves on lemmy. a single instance does not show how widespread the issue is. if you want to be a journalist do better.
… Thanks for the downvote, boss XD
Have a great day.
Thanks for the extremely helpful analogy
That is even worse. So it has been ongoing for at least 4 months now.
Yeah, that’s how I read it :)
I mean like I need another reason to NOT buy a Dodge/Chrysler/Jeep/Ram
