“Hey! Yo! Is that your Magnum?” I heard a voice in the front yard call out. I opened the door to find one of my thirtysomething neighbors who had spotted the maroon Dodge Magnum RT test car parked on the street. He was wearing a bowling shirt and baggy shorts, several earrings and a couple of ounces of high-quality tattoo ink swirling around his body–flaming dice, crossed pistols, hearts and death’s heads, Bettie Page in fishnets.
He explained that he and his wife had been trying to find a Dodge Magnum RT in Los Angeles because they had a 2-year-old daughter–wha?!–and they needed a family car. None of the local dealers had the RT edition–with the 340-horsepower Hemi V8–and he was thinking of driving to Las Vegas to find one.
My neighbor is the Magnum’s ideal demographic: Sometime between being hip and breaking a hip, even kool kats need a family car.
Let’s get right to it: What makes the Magnum work is its subversive, hot-rod styling, which to me has a distinct rockabilly vibe. In this tribal subculture, with its goth-kitsch fascination with ’50s teen rebellion, the cars are big and bad.
At 197.7 inches long, the Magnum isn’t particularly big, about the same length as a Chevy Monte Carlo. But its massive, blocky styling lends it that look of naked bulk that characterized the great lead sleds of the ’50s and ’60s.
Meanwhile, the styling vernacular is right out of the California rod-and-custom playbook. One of hot-rodding’s favorite tricks is to cut a few inches out of a car’s roof pillars and lower the roof, giving the car a slightly desperate, James Dean squint. This is the “chop” in the phrase “chopped and channeled.” The Magnum’s chop-top roofline, glowering greenhouse, low stance and road-scraping body skirts all convey a wonderful, retro delinquency.
With the Magnum RT, retro is more than skin deep. Under the hood is an overhead-valve 5.7-liter V8–that’s 350 cubic inches to the fuzzy-dice set–mated to a rear-wheel-drive drivetrain. We haven’t seen that combo in a station wagon since the dearly defunct Buick Roadmaster wagon of the late 1990s, I think.
Dodge is going to some trouble to sell the Magnum RT as a “sports tourer,” i.e., a performance wagon, and its posted time from nil to 60 m.p.h.–6.3 seconds–is nothing to toss beer bottles at.
At highway speeds, the RT runs with quiet, effortless authority and plenty of mid-range passing punch. The interior has a studied simplicity, with straightforward rotary climate and audio controls, a four-gauge instrument cluster with black-on-white lettering, leather seating and a kind of indoor-outdoor, rubber-and-plastic dash and door treatment.
In keeping with its young-parent audience, the car has loads of safety content, including auto-reverse power windows (to prevent hand entrapment), smart front air bags and side curtain air bags, rear parking assist and child-safety seat anchors.
Until the Magnum, there wasn’t a domestic–OK, quasi-domestic–entry in the hot wagon category. The Magnum claims this territory and tattoos it with a heart that says “Mother.” As Gen-Xers yield to the imperatives of biology, the market needs more family vehicles that stand out from the hordes of bourgeois boomers.–
———-
Edited by Cara DiPasquale (cdipasquale@tribune.com) and alBerto Trevino (atrevino@tribune.com)
