I personally don't see too much wrong with bumping the displacement up a few notches. The people who are going to buy a super expensive, useless Jeep are the "there's no replacement for displacement" guys. They aren't really going to care much about the fuel economy of the thing, just noise and power.
And that is also something that helps separate the American cars from everybody else. If we all adopted turbo 6s and the like, then there wouldn't be as much separating us from the European cars, and since the Europeans (and Japanese) can build some pretty good cars these days, I'm sure the American muscle cars wouldn't do quite as well.
Also I'm not exactly thrilled this is what my tax dollars are producing. I was kind of hoping Chrysler would drop their SRT line after the government backed a truck load of money up to them. Chrysler needs to make cars people can buy, not cars people think are cool.
I agree about 85%. Throwing an SRT line together is going to cost them a bit, and they probably won't make much off of it. I very rarely see any SRT-8 Jeeps, and while I do think they're pretty cool, I do wonder why they bothered to build them if you never see them.
However, a good performance line is a great advertisement. The reason I've liked GM so much is mostly due to me having grown up loving every Corvette ever made. It was consistently the coolest American car, and it was still cool when nobody else made cool cars. And because of that, General Motors was a cool company in my book. And so then I would probably look more favorably on their products when it comes to buying a car.
And similarly with the Mustang. The 2010 is a sweet looking vehicle, and combined with a decent seeming lineup, Ford rises a few notches in my book. And I'm utterly disappointed with the Camaro, so GM suddenly doesn't seem so cool
