2007 Dodge Sprinter 144 Wb Cargo Van on 2040-cars

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Dodge shows can-do attitude with grand Can'avan sculpture

There are lots of ways to celebrate an important birthday, and all of them are well deserved. You can throw a big party, buy yourself something nice, or - if you're the altruistic type - do something for others in need. The latter is how Chrysler has opted to mark the 30th anniversary of its Dodge Grand Caravan and Chrysler Town & Country.
Together with hunger-advocacy organization Canstruction, the Chrysler Foundation has built a full-scale replica of the Grand Caravan out of 30,000 food cans in the square at the corner of Yonge and Dundas in Toronto, a ways down the highway from where the real vans are built in Windsor. The sculpture was built over the course of 10 hours by 30 volunteers and was displayed earlier this week.
Now the installation is being taken down, and the cans of food are being donated to the Daily Bread Food Bank, which will assemble them into 2,000 food baskets to be distributed to those in need through its network of 200 food banks across the Canadian metropolis. Check out a neat time-lapse video of the build and the press release below.

Cold start comparison: 2020 Alfa Romeo Giulia Quadrifoglio vs. 2013 Dodge Challenger SRT8

The 2020 Alfa Romeo Giulia Quadrifoglio is a five-seat, compact luxury sport sedan packing 505 horsepower thanks to a 2.9-liter twin-turbocharged V6. My personal 2013 Dodge Challenger SRT8 392 is ... well ... not. It's a full-sized muscle coupe whose iron-block 6.4-liter V8 makes 470 hp in the very traditional way: it's freakin' huge, like everything else about the car.  On paper, these two have nothing in common beyond the fact that they were built by the same multi-national manufacturing entity.  But if paper were the be-all and end-all of automotive rankings, everybody would buy the same car. And we don't, especially as enthusiasts. Whether it's looks or tuning or vague "intangibles" or something as simple as the way a car sounds, we often put a priority on the things that trigger our emotions rather than setting out to simply buy whatever the "best" car is at that particular moment.  So, what do these two have in common? They both sound really, really good. Like looks, sounds are subjective. While a rubric most assuredly exists in the world of marketing (attraction is as much a science as any other human response), we have no way of objectively scoring the beauty of either of these cars, and the same applies to the qualities of the sound waves being emitted through their tail pipes.  But we can measure how loud they are. In fact, there's even an app for that. Dozens, as it turns out. So, I picked one at random that recorded peak loudness levels, and set off to conduct an entirely pointless and only vaguely scientific experiment with the two cars that happened to be in my garage at the same time.  For the test, I opened up a window and cracked the garage door (so as not to inflict carbon monoxide poisoning upon myself in the name of discovery), and then placed my phone on a tripod behind the center of each car's trunk lid. I fired each one up and let the app do the rest. I then placed my GoPro on top of the trunk for each test so that I could review the video afterward for any anomalies.  I started with the Challenger. The 6.4-liter Hemi under the hood of this big coupe is essentially the same lump found under the hood of quite a few Ram pickups, and it has the accessories to prove it. Its starter is loud and distinctive. Almost as loud, it turns out, as the exhaust itself. As its loud pew-pew faded behind the V8's barking cold start, we recorded a peak of 83.7 decibels. In the app's judgment, that's roughly the equivalent of a busy street.

Old vs. New: 2014 SRT Viper takes on upgraded 16-year-old Dodge Viper

It's easy to play the "Would you rather have a New X or an Old Y with a bunch of upgrades?" game more often than we care to admit, but the crew at Car and Driver have taken bench racing to the next level with their latest video. In it, the magazine pits a brand-new 2014 SRT Viper against a highly modified 1997 Dodge Viper GTS. There are 16 years between the time this particular GTS rolled off the production line and when the new car bowed, but that doesn't mean the old snake's owners have been sitting on their hands.
Thanks to a spate of modifications, the GTS offers up a better power to weight ratio than the new machine, but is that enough to overcome the technological leap forward represented by the 2014 Viper? We won't spoil it for you. You'll just have to check out the full clip below for yourself.