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There’s no question the launch of the new Dodge Charger has been rough. Dodge is doing everything it can to make people like the new muscle car outside of shoving a V8 under its hood, for now. But lack of V8 aside, there’s no question the design and marketing team understood the assignment. The reincarnated icon even has an Attitude Adjustment feature. You can’t make this stuff up. It’s even on the car’s window sticker!
While my time with the gas-powered 2026 Dodge Charger Scat Pack resulted in the car bricking itself three times, the features and design were an eye-catching high point. While shooting photos of the four-door charger in a parking lot I was scrolling through the menus and stumbled upon a an app dubbed Attitude Adjustment. What the heck? Opening the app revealed Stellantis’ marketing and branding genius at work.
Joel Feder
Joel Feder
The Attitude Adjustment app in the Dodge Charger is the branding for the vehicle’s interior ambient lighting controls. There’s nothing inherently new about interior ambient lighting, but, the way in which the Dodge Charger’s team went about branding the feature falls somewhere between cheeky and cringe. Your opinion will likely vary.
But Team Dodge didn’t just rebrand its ambient lighting system in the Charger to speak to its buying demographic. No Ma’am. Attitude-Adjustment Lighting is an actual line item on the car’s window sticker. The feature is part of the test car’s $4,995 Customer Preferred Package 22B, which included among other things, ventilated front seats, heated second-row seats, a 16-inch digital gauge cluster, Performance Pages in the infotainment system, a head-up display, a surround-view camera system, a wireless charging pad, a power rear hatch, a 12.3-inch touchscreen infotainment system, and a laundry list of other features.
The Attitude Adjustment is a far cry from the first example of Stellantis’ marketing and branding machine at play. When Ram brought back the Hemi V8 in the Ram 1500 it called the move a “Symbol of Protest.” But the automaker didn’t stop there. The “Symbol of Protest” is a real badge on the truck’s fender. More than that, the badge is an actual line item on the truck’s window sticker. The three-row Dodge Durango SRT Hellcat? It’s a family hauler that has the little human icon on the climate control screen wearing a racing helmet in a family hauler. If we hop into the Wayback Machine the original Challenger Hellcat was supposed to have a Supercharged badge on the front fenders. A pre-production car I tested even had the Supercharged badge on the fender. The Hellcat logo wasn’t originally going to be on the front fender, but then it roared to life just before production started and an icon was cemented into the history books.
You have to hand it to Stellantis and its marketing team, no other automotive company comes up with more creative spin aimed at their buyers.
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As Director of Content and Product, Joel draws on over 15 years of newsroom experience and inability to actually stop working to help ensure The Drive shapes the future of automotive media. He’s also a World Car Award juror.
