I'm on vacation in Arizona, which is nice, 'cause it's fifteen below zero and snowing at home. Our rental car (from Enterprise) is an '06 Charger. Having lived with it for a week and 800 miles now, I must report that I don't like it, partly because of what's entailed in it being a new 2006 car, and partly because it is this *particular* car.
Too many controls aren't well thought out. The cruise control is on a
*stalk*, which is a giant step backward. Chrysler was among the first to put the controls on the steering wheel when they went to the Accustar column in '90. That was an enormous improvement over the previous stalk location. Now they've removed them from the wheel and put them back on a stalk. On their *own* stalk, which occupies the space normally reserved for the turn signal stalk, displacing the latter downward at a bizarre angle and into a bizarre position so you have to grope for it. The cruise stalk itself works OK as a control device, but it should've been put on the right, somewhere in that vast plain left empty by the ignition switch's dashboard location.The turn signal stalk, meanwhile, controls the signals, headlight beam selection and the windshield wipers, but not the parking and headlamps, which are on their own rotary switch on the dashboard. Nothing too grossly objectionable here, I guess, but it's a bit of a nonstandard grouping. And the beam selection is achieved by pushing the lever forward for high beam, pulling rearward for low beam, or pulling extra rearward for high beam flash. That's how Japanese cars do it, so it must be better, right? (wrong!)
The car comes equipped with about seventy percent of the average Buick's Nanny Buttwiper devices; five minutes' effort with the glovebox manual and the ignition key shuts off some of them (auto lock, auto unlock) but not others. It's still too much. This car has hyperactive IP warning lamps and chimes. Start the engine before fastening your seatbelt, and the seatbelt light blinks and the chime sounds for the Federally-mandated 7 seconds...and for five seconds every fifteen seconds thereafter. Go ahead and buckle in, and *Chime!*. Congratulations, you fastened your safety belt all by yourself.
Start the engine with belt fastened but take the car out of Park before releasing the parking brake, the brake warning lamp flashes urgently and the chime sounds. Release the brake, and *ChimeChime!* Congratulations, you released the brake all by yourself.
The parking brake itself is a pedal type unit, with a hand release. The pedal itself feels as if it's connected to nothing at all. Put your foot on it, and it flies to the floor. It holds the car OK, not as well as others I've used. At least it's not one of those obnoxious kick-to-apply, kick-to-release types or the import-copycat spacewasting hand lever.
Sometimes you get a *Chime!* or *ChimeChime!* for no apparent reason. Congratulations, you're super!
The accelerator is a spring-loaded dimmer switch mechanically connected to nothing at all. Feedback, there is none. Also, when using the cruise control, the pedal stays at the idle position. Want to speed up just a little to pass another vehicle? Sure, but you'll have to grope around through the accelerator's travel to find the point past which additional acceleration happens. It would've been a simple matter of programming to move that point to the top of the accelerator's travel when the cruise is engaged, but they didn't. Instead, they spent their time carefully programming the drive-by-wire so that if you blow your nose towards the accelerator with the transmission in gear, the force of the booger landing on the pedal causes the car to lurch. Vroom vroom! Powerful acceleration feeling, vroom vroom! I'm sure it makes for impressive test drives, but it makes parking garage maneuvering spastic and difficult to control. The cruise control continues this theme; the "resume" function causes the car to lurch (charge?) ahead with needless alacrity and a jarring and noisy downshift. A more gradual return to the previously-set speed would be more appropriate.
The horn is all the way in the middle of the steering wheel, coincident with the airbag cover. Not a good place. The wheel itself is well shaped, so I guess that's something. The window lift switches are halfassed in that someone somewhere in the chain of command specified intuitive rear-hinged switches (push down to lower the window, pull up to raise). Fine idea, poorly implemented. There's nothing intuitive about the feel of the switches, and they are all crammed together. You have to look down at them to get the correct switch and operate it properly, and even then, if it's the driver window you want lowered, there's almost no detent at all between "down" and "auto down", so frequently the window drops out of sight when all that was desired was a 2" air gap. The door lock switch is OK, but the manual door lock knobs in the rear doors are at the *rear*, not the front, of each door. They cannot be reached from the front. Sure, yeah, they're power, so what? Sometimes it's necessary or desireable to unlock *one* rear door without futzing with the power buttons. Or, for that matter, to look through the nearest window to check if the doors are locked or unlocked. You cannot see the rear lock buttons from outside.
The gauges are the trendy electroluminescent (or faux-electroluminescent) black-on-white variety, and they're plenty legible, though automatic cars still don't need tachometers. There is no way to turn *off* the IP illumination, only to make it more bright or less bright. Um...yeah, thanks, you're right, I didn't really want to turn 'em off; if I had really wanted to, you would've let me.
The ignition key, as previously mentioned, is in the dash, *almost* where it belongs. You have to insert it at about a 10:30/4:30 angle; the "run" position has the key vertical. This isn't a major irritant, just a minor one. What's a major irritant is the *huge* delay between turning the key to "start" and having the starter engage. I'm not talking microseconds here; if you insert-and-twist-to-start, there is time for the hyperactive chime to go *ChimeChimeChime!* (or for you to sit through a long second and a half's silence, depending on the chime's mood) before the starter engages. I do not know or care why this is done, but I do know it doesn't have to be that way, and that it shouldn't.
The fast windshield rake angle seriously restricts the view outward and causes the rearview mirror to obstruct far too much of the important part of the forward-rightward view when I adjust my seating position for proper vision to the sides and rear. Lower the seat so the rearview mirror no longer is such an obstacle, and sideward/rearward visibility is proportionally hampered. I take especial care to adjust all the adjustables to fit me when I get in a car not my own, and even so, a two hour highway drive left me cramped in the leg, ankle, left shoulder and neck. And I'm right smack in the middle of average height! Body fixtures and interior materials are somewhat better than they were in the Chrysler products of the early '90s. Legroom's acceptable for a
6'5" passenger.NVH is at about the same level as it was in my 1992 4-cylinder LeBaron sedan, which is unacceptable given the interceding 17 model years' supposed advances since my '92 was designed, and the fact that my '92 had almost 150k miles on it when I bought it, while this car had 953 miles when I picked it up. The power steering pump or something else under the hood puts out a constant buzzing, grinding whine that changes pitch with engine speed and is audible inside the car with all the windows up. H'm...the P/S pump and other engine-driven accessories on my '65 Valiant were silent. Ditto my '91, and my '92, and my other '91, and my other '92, and my '62, and my '89, for that matter. What happened? I've heard this noise on too many other new and recent Mopars to dismiss it as a one-off.
The V6 engine has adequate acceleration, with a Taurus-like warbling V6 engine note that I find very offputting. I don't like V6s. Unfortunately, I find the rest of the car so unpleasant that even the substitution of a largely-pointless V8 engine wouldn't make me like it. It is not fun, relaxing, comfortable rewarding or easy to drive.
I could grouse a fair bit about the car's lighting system, but I'm on vacation and deliberately not thinking about car lights.
All in all, I give the car about a C/C+.