Endless Dodge Teasers Are Not Helping The SRT Demon's Cause

Okay, Dodge: enough is enough. Stop with the teasers for the Challenger SRT Demon and just launch the damned thing. Pun intended. Sorry.

We’ve already had seven(!) teaser videos, and guess what, dear CTzen and consumer? There are still seven to come before the Demon is actually launched. We’ve been good-natured about it so far, but we’ve reached a limit.

We already know it’s a serious speed freak with a single seat, customisable parts, a hell of a supercharger whine and a special Drag Mode. Also ticked off are a massive airbox, a new and much stronger torque converter and a 90kg weight saving.

Seriously, how much more do we need to have dangled in front of our eyes before the launch itself becomes a bit meaningless? If we’re given three-quarters of the jigsaw’s pieces and already know what the picture is going to show, where’s the excitement in filling in the gaps?

The Demon is going to be an immense product, and I don’t (only) mean its size. Built for straight-line speed either on the drag strip or the road, depending on how each buyer specs it up, it’s about as focused and single-minded as cars get. It’s going to have at least 700bhp, so we know it’s going to be a weapon. The teasing is irritating. Dodge, just give it to us in a big cloud of tyre smoke and then let us dribble over all your amazing handiwork in our own good time.

Every week brings a new teaser video and a new snippet of data about the car. But every week it feels like a false start; an anticlimax; yet another round of foreplay when you just want to get down and do the bad thing. It’s bloody frustrating, and sooner or later we’ll lose interest. Some people already have, judging by some of your comments in recent weeks.

Dodge isn’t alone in trying too hard to build hype for one of its cars. McLaren is guilty as well, for its P14 project. We’ve lost count of the amount of teasers, spy shots, leaked titbits of information and projected performance figures we’ve seen, and not much of it falls outside what’s been officially sanctioned.

Electric car manufacturer startups are even worse. ‘Here’s our new ultra-amzing, super-luxurious, hyper-fast and definitely better than a Tesla electric car!’ comes the cry, followed by much smaller print saying that it won’t be here for another couple of years while they actually go about finding some funding and trying to build it.

Marketing campaigns that are designed to drum up investment through (at best) hopeful predictions or (at worst) outright fabrications are nasty, low-brow attempts to force unrealistic dreams into reality. It’s fool’s gold. We’re not impressed and we still won’t be the next time it happens.

Maybe Dodge thinks it’s doing something unique, slowly building the excitement until it can unleash a messy global climax of Demon-related press coverage, but the online world moves too fast, and what happened a week ago is ancient history. What happened 14 weeks ago is borderline irrelevant. A 14-week video campaign is an idea born of a different age. It’s too long, too slow and it just doesn’t work.

So Dodge, we already know a lot about the SRT Demon. We even know what it looks like courtesy of Vin Diesel. Please just give us the pictures, give us the information and bask in the glory. There’s only so much teasing we’re happy to put up with.