We’re not normally in the business of throwing shade at random, fly-by-night parts shops, but then again, we’re not normally in the business of having our content stolen and repurposed by AI-using “outlets” who are trying to sell aftermarket schlock to unsuspecting Mopar enthusiasts. Lookin’ at you, there, Vicrez.
Vicrez maintains an online parts store (skinned to look suspiciously like Amazon; we’re not going to link to that) and a blog that’s curiously devoid of any human bylines and paired with talking-head style videos that are almost certainly AI-generated. It also appears to have once maintained a brick-and-mortar shop of some sort in Santa Fe Springs, Calif. (reviews were… not good), though its job listings suggest the company is operated by somebody based in Oklahoma.
The original images are from a review of the two-door Dodge Charger Daytona Scat Pack published on The Drive last March. It was the author (and photographer), Bradley Iger, who tipped us to Vicrez’s shenanigans. He confirmed that he hadn’t sold photos from the same set to anybody else or posted them elsewhere for potential purloining.
And while the “edited” versions on Vicrez aren’t 1:1 rips, there are some dead giveaways that the site grabbed our photos and ran them through some AI tool to generate the altered versions. Take a look at the photo sets side-by-side above. You can see that the background from our side profile photo is the same one in Vicrez’s front and rear 3/4 images—the rock formation, the plant roots, the little bit of red and white trash, even matching tire marks are all there, though slightly changed with AI.
Meanwhile, the position of the car doesn’t line up between our photos and their versions, but if you look at our photo set, you can find matching angles for each one of theirs. Not to mention the fact that the details and proportions on the Charger are all a bit off in their images in ways that can’t be explained by a physical body kit. Legally, they’ve probably done just enough to ward off a cease & desist from our lawyers. But we’re still going to call out the obvious. Like how the car has a black spoiler in the altered front 3/4 shot, but it’s missing in the rear 3/4 one.
The real crime here isn’t against us, or even Vicrez’s customers, but against common sense itself, because it’s going to take more than a low-effort body kit to transform your Dodge Charger like this. If the “after” shot looks too good to be true, well, that’s because it’s fake. As is the AI-generated b-roll clip Vicrez added to its announcement as if that’s somehow proof that this is actually real.
Look, maybe it is. Maybe Vicrez’s body kit is engineered from a polymer infused with raw unicorn extract, allowing it to magically imbue an EV with a gas engine and sprout an exhaust system. And maybe Vicrez was founded by Doc Brown and this new kit turns the Charger Daytona into a time machine, allowing the company intern to go back to the exact date these photos were taken in order to replicate the location and lighting exactly.
Or maybe some “entrepreneur” just asked Gemini (or Claude, or ChatGPT, or any number of other available generative tools) to slap some last-gen Charger elements on the current car and call it good. Hint: That’s now how the Fratzonic setup works. At all. And even if you want to be charitable and say the kit is really in the early stages of production and Vicrez just spun up these AI images to make a splash, well, that’s not a business we’d trust with our money.
Remember, we’re talking about image *generators* here, not just editors. They don’t just draw on the source material you provide them, but images culled from all over digital media. The above appears to be a mirrored and edited version of the hero image used in our article from last year, but several others have gone through more rigorous AI polishing. Isn’t the new world amazing?
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