[Charlie]

I haven't been around VK for the past several weeks. I got my new car a month ago, and been dealing with some troubles... but seems they are straightened out now.

Got my car Feb 4th. Was a dreary cloudy day (we've had a lot of those lately). On the drive home (I live an hour from the dealership), I noticed an unusual vibration throughout the car. I decided to drive it a few days and see if it would go away (which I figured it probably wouldn't) and then ended up back at the dealership about a week later.

The service mgr drove the car with me, detected what I was describing, and told me they would check the balance on all the tires. I kinda felt like it wasn't a tire... this vibration had a weird rhythm to it. The dealer had the car ready for me the next day (Friday evening) and I went to pick it up. He said all four wheels were off. I got on the highway to go home, and after about 5 miles, I realized the vibration was still there! Since it was almost 5 pm on a Friday, I just continued home.

Over the weekend, I did a lot of reading on Dodge forums. I noticed a few guys talking about driveshaft issues. One guy in a new Charger had a vibration, and it was corrected by rotating the shaft 180 degrees. A few others talked about having them replaced on other cars.

Monday, I brought it back and mentioned the driveshaft. He said they would look into it. I got the car back nearly 2 weeks later. It got a new driveshaft... problem solved. Come to find out, they had swapped wheels/tires with another car on the lot... didn't work. Then they swapped driveshafts (which sounds like a lengthy process on these cars) and that made the vibration go away. Ordered a new one... it arrived the following week. All is well now.

I've made a couple of small trips in it so far... one to Baton Rouge and another to Mississippi. Car does great on trips. I had 3 other people in the car for the Mississippi trip. Everyone was comfortable... even in the back seat. The car is much larger than a Mustang, so if you put anyone in the back seat, they won't be crunched up in a fetal position. The car got 25 mpg... sometimes it got as much as 27 mpg. Not bad for a 375 horse V8.

I certainly dig the power it's got. It's amazing what they get out of these engines compared to just 20 years ago! There's a rumor out that next year's model will have about 50 more hp on the 5.7 engine (apparently to be more competitive with the Mustang). There's a Zero to Sixty timer on the dash. That's a really neat feature. I played with that a few times... my best time was 4.98 seconds.

Seems I also read somewhere that next year's SRT model will have nearly 600 hp! That's friggin crazy! What do you do with 600 hp???

After reading on those forums, it sounds like many guys have issues with timing chains (at least it sounds like that problem was corrected a couple of years ago). There's also the "hemi tick" that they talk about. Mine has that just a little bit. It kinda reminds me of what a slant-6 used to sound like. It's very subtle, but it's there. Even the service manager told me that was normal.

A couple of pics are below... not the best pics, though. It's hard to keep the car spotless out here in the woods, and it seems lately that most days are cloudy.