One of the more head-scratching fads of the past few years comes from the Mopar community. Dodge installed yellow plastic protectors on Challenger and Charger splitters to protect them while being transported to dealers and, inevitably, some dealers delivered the vehicles to customers with the guards still in place. Some of their customers liked the look, and decided to leave them on, and reinstalling the splitter guards went on to become a popular aesthetic 'mod'. With communities being communities, it became a whole drama over what people can and can't do with their own damn cars.

Now SRT's Head Of Design, Mark Trostle, has weighed in via a video from Brian Makse's YouTube channel, and he's not impressed by the fad. "This is the final word: When we did the sketch for the Charger and Challenger, it never had yellow strips on it," Trostle declares before, looking somewhat incredulous as he follows up, saying: "I wish they would take them off, you're just ruining the paint! And they say to be removed by dealer, it's molded in. It's there to ship the vehicle. It ruins, to me, as a designer, it ruins the lines of the car."

Apparently, it really is the last word as Dodge is backing him by making the splitter protection strip's color a lot less desirable. "For the new splitter guards, we've introduced a new, fashionable purple color that...we'll see if that one takes off. I hope it doesn't. It's purple."

Purple is a difficult color to pair with any other color, which makes it a good choice to dissuade people from leaving on the splitter protector. We doubt it'll actually work though, and all it will probably do is encourage people to "upgrade" or still leave them on to denote a newer model. Ultimately, you can't underestimate the general public's lack of taste. Or, access to cans of spray paint for that matter.