Is there anything more cringe than brands trying to hop on a social media trend? How about when they half-ass the idea with some incredibly lazy AI and churn out slop that includes vehicles that the brand didn't even make? That's what Dodge has just done with a post to its Instagram account. There are just three images, but each one is loaded with hilarious flubs. AI-Tinted Nostalgia Hits Like A New Track From Vanilla Ice Dodge "Was cleaning out the garage and came across some old family photos." It's a great trend, at least if you're on the particular cross-section of the algorithm that got it to you. Old family photos are a great way to show how cool you thought you were back in the day, and to inject some of that sweet, sweet nostalgia into your veins. But what if you don't actually have such photos?The first one is a Dodge Neon with "my little brother at the height of his goth phase." It's tagging a third-gen Ram 1500, which was a Dodge way back then. Yes, kids, it's true. The Ram looks mostly right, at least if you don't notice the missing window on the extended cab and some other details.It's the Neon, though. Almost nothing about it is right, starting with, well, everything. Okay, the rear wing is probably right.Dodge` The headlights? Wrong. Dodge never sold a Neon with double bubble headlights. The single almost-round light was part of the car's signature, going back to the very first Neon immortalized by the "Hi" ad campaign. The hood is wrong, the grill is wrong, the lower fascia is wrong. Even the wheels are wrong. Somehow they aren't concentric, with the hub far closer to the bottom than the top of the tire. The real one is in the image above. This is supposed to be an SRT-4, but, well, it just isn't.The next photo is another classic. A vintage Viper R/T10 with a Dodge Dakota and the classic reversed ghost silhouette layout.In this one, the Dakota is mostly right, so credit again for that. At least in the main image. In the ghost silhouette, it's a completely different truck. Instead of a Quad Cab, it's an extended cab. The wheels are also different, and why is there so much space above the rear tires? The Dakota and Viper generations don't match up, but after the Neon fiasco, that feels like a minor issue.The Viper, though, manages to top it. Remember the iconic three-spoke wheels from the original Viper? This car splits the difference, with four-spoke wheels on the bottom image and some incredibly deep-dish two-spokes on the top. The Viper's roll bar and windshield have been chopped in that image too, and the whole thing beefed up. Yes, The Dodge Shadow Convertible Is Real In the third image, you're probably thinking that Dodge never made a convertible Shadow. You'd be wrong. These little soft-tops were actually built for a few years. It even had that big puffy cover for the top, like a VW Cabrio. Where things go wrong on this one are the sides, where the car has a channel that never existed. A convertible would have had body-color door handles, too.Then there is the witty banter between Dodge and Ram's official brand accounts. Gems like "Mom did always call you her 'heavy boy'." Yikes.Dodge AWD Image (1)Of course, Dodge hasn't needed AI to release some incredibly bad images over the years. The above image used to show the winter capability of the 2020 Dodge Charger GT AWD is a particular highlight, and we've included the 2017 Challenger AWD image that was the starting point.The sad part here is that Dodge (and now Stellantis) actually has a great archive of old vehicle photos going back over 100 years. We aren't talking about some secret files either – there's a section of the company's media website devoted to legacy vehicles. Perhaps this post was done badly on purpose? A mockery of the various AI car images that crop up all-too often in our feeds? If that is actually the case, it wasn't executed very well.But if Dodge did just figure it would let AI do a quick throwback series and nobody would notice... well we did. And judging by the comments in the post, so did pretty much the entire world. Do better, Dodge.
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