2024 Dodge Charger Daytona First Drive- Can an EV be a Muscle Car? | MotorTrend

Have you ever heard an EV that sounds like this? Have you ever seen an EV do this? Have you ever smelled an EV do this? What the hell, it won't do a burnout? That's right, the 2024 Dodge Charger Daytona, the electric successor to the gas-chugging, tire-eviscerating Challenger, can't do a burnout. Wait, wait, wait, wait, wait, wait. Before you throw your phone into a pond, just stick with me to the end. Despite the fact that Daytona can't smoke its rear meat, Dodge wants you to think of this car as a muscle car at first, and an EV, well, somewhere after. It's got a hulking presence, it's obnoxiously loud, outrageously powerful, and absurdly quick. Of course, the reason this car can't do a burnout isn't for a lack of power or torque. It makes 670 horsepower and 628 pound-feet of torque. But, all that output is split equally front and rear. And, of course, this is a single-speed EV, which means that one gear ratio has to take you all the way from idle, or one mile per hour, up to top speed. And so that single gear ratio is much taller than first gear in a gas vehicle. Add that up with some pretty grippy tires, you just can't break the tires free. It's a bummer that Dodge didn't think to put in some kind of software algorithm to help you break it free. But, instead, they've done the opposite. This vehicle does not like pedal overlap, where you're applying both the brake and the accelerator. To me, it's the biggest miss with this car. You're telling me to think of it as a muscle car, and it can't do burnouts. That said, if you're not trying to smoke the tires, and you just care about going fast, this thing's got the juice. I've got the powertrain in the most relaxed street mode, but if I hit power shot and flatten the accelerator, holy hell, this thing goes. Dodge claims a quarter mile time of 11.5 seconds for the $75,185 Scat Pack. And I actually ran in 11.47 seconds at 119.5 miles per hour on a drag strip. If it can reproduce those times in our testing on a street surface, the Daytona will easily walk every Hellcat Motor Trend has ever tested. The $61,590 RT model uses the exact same motors, but it's software-limited to 496 horsepower and 404 pound-feet of torque, which takes a big bite out of the zero-to-60 time at a claimed 4.7 seconds. There will, of course, eventually be an SRT model that will almost certainly launch to 60 in less than three seconds. Of course, everybody can and does make EVs that are blindingly quick in a straight line. What really caught me by surprise is how good the Daytona's chassis is. This Charger Daytona feels much more composed, like a much better handling vehicle than the Challenger it replaces, and that's for two main reasons. The first is that this vehicle was designed from the outset, the body structure of the chassis, for the most powerful versions that Dodge will make. And that's not true. If you look at the bones of that old Challenger platform, they set out and they only worked on those mainstream versions initially. And when it came time to make the SRT versions, they sat down and said, oh man, how are we gonna do this? How are we gonna strengthen it, stiffen it to handle this extra power and torque? They did that from the beginning. And with the battery installed, this vehicle is 50% stiffer than the Challenger it replaces. The second factor is the fact that the weight distribution and torque distribution is split evenly. Whereas the old Challenger, you had all this weight up front, sending all the torque to the rear. And so it understeered, under braking, when you're trying to trail braking in the corners, and it liked to oversteer when you're applying power exiting those corners. That can be fun. That can be a ton of fun. But this vehicle feels far more ruthless and effective in cornering. I don't know if all of that's gonna hold up on the track, but we're gonna find out. Putting the old Challenger on a track was always a recipe for disappointment. Too heavy, too soft, too uncoordinated. And this electric Charger Daytona is predictably even more massive than the car it replaces. It weighs 5,900 pounds, more than a thousand pounds heavier than a Tesla Model S Plaid. Suffice it to say, I pulled onto the road course at Radford Racing School with low expectations. This car is massively heavy, 5,900 pounds. Of course, it's got plenty of power to compensate 670 horsepower in the scat pack when I push that power shot button. And what I'll say about the weight is the steering is to be extremely immediate. There's no hesitation. You don't have to wait for the suspension or the bushings to load up. This thing goes. It definitely feels more athletic than the Challenger that it replaces. That's maybe not saying a whole lot. Of course, the scat pack has the track package, which is bigger brakes, adaptive dampers. This one has staggered summer tires on it. Goodyear Eagle F1 Supercar 3s. And I would say it's got the right amount of grip. It's not a track hero. It doesn't have the amazing track rubber, but enough grip to have a ton of fun with this car. The balance on this is actually fantastic. I think all those stories we wrote over the years about Challengers and Chargers being kind of reluctant to turn in and not a ton of fun on a road course. Maybe time to stop writing those stories. Of course, a racetrack isn't a muscle car's natural habitat, which is probably why Dodge included a drift in donut mode, which sends stability control on a lunge brake and delivers more torque to the rear wheels. Like pretty much every all-wheel drive car, it takes some finesse to sustain a drift in the Daytona. And weirdly, sometimes the inside front tire starts furiously spinning in the middle of the bend. But getting the rear end to break loose isn't all that hard, and it makes for a hilarious and fun consolation prize for that whole not doing a burnout thing. At this point, we have to talk about the most controversial aspect of the Dodge Charger Daytona, the way it sounds. The temptation to pull a Milli Vanilli using the Hellcat's vocals must have been strong, but the NBH team resisted and instead took a field trip to the old Viper assembly plant where the comfy crown jewels are now kept. There, they sampled the exhaust note of every vehicle in the historical collection. That's why you'll hear the windup of a Chrysler turbine car layered into the ignition sequence and the car idles, quote-unquote, with the same 38 hertz primary frequency of the original Hemi. Those sounds originate from speakers powered by a dedicated 600-watt amp that are mounted to a 1.5-cubic-foot enclosure mounted behind the rear fascia to give it the resonance and volume we've been conditioned to expect from a Dodge Mustang. What's most strange about the Daytona is that it seems to have at least three different vocal personalities. The futuristic startup and shutdown sequences remind me of a Dolby sound test. The engine rev comes across as a lo-fi sound effect from an 80s arcade game, and the deep thrum when driving it is closest to a combustion engine. Maybe the best thing about it is that if you hate it, you can completely shut it off. So we've established that the Charger Daytona is unique among EVs, but how is it as an electric vehicle? What's the range and the charging like? Well, the Scat Pack version gets 241 miles on the EPA cycle, not bad, but if you're willing to sacrifice some speed and performance, take some lower-grip tires, you can get up to 300 heat miles in the RT. The Daytona is an awesome highway cruiser with a buttery smooth ride and tomb-like silence in the cabin. Tesla could learn a thing or two from Dodge about sealing frameless windows. On road trips, though, the RT's long legs will be cramped by its mediocre charging. Dodge claims, very specifically, that both models peak at 183 kilowatts of charging power, and that the 100.5-kilowatt-hour battery can be charged from 5% to 80% in 32 1⁄2 minutes. So much of the Charger Daytona's appeal is the way it looks, because it looks like no other EV. This vehicle is inspired by the 1968 Charger, with the linear horizontal elements and the very vertical front fascia, and the separation between the front of the car, the side of the car, and the rear of the car. It's a huge vehicle. If it were any wider, they'd have to put those amber off-road markers on it that you see on Raptors and ZR2s. The wheelbase has stretched five inches relative to the old Challenger, which makes for a huge backseat. And to reign in all that mass, this has the largest tire and brake packages of any Dodge muscle car. From the inside, the Daytona is the Chevy Suburban of two-door cars, feeling positively cavernous. A pair of digital screens take control of most functions, along with a strip of capacitive climate controls that provide haptic feedback with a loud, cheap click. An optional fixed glass roof and ambient lighting splash light across the cabin. And the rear seats are probably the most accommodating we've ever experienced in a two-door, at least any built in the past 40 years. There's room for a six-foot-three passenger in the back, with legroom to spare. The hatchback opens to reveal a massive 22.8 cubic feet of cargo space, while the 1.5-cubic-foot front can swallow a backpack or a small duffel bag. So where is it all net out? The Charger Daytona is a powerful, yet comfortable roadrunner that's equally at home rocketing down a laser-straight desert highway or chasing apexes up a canyon road. But Dodge's efforts to bring its unique brand of muscle car energy to the EV world is a mixed success. Strip away the sound and the donut mode, and the Daytona doesn't drive all that different than a Tesla or a BMW. I'm not sure Dodge will take that as a compliment, but it should. And yet, even without hearing or driving this car, we could have held the Charger Daytona off as proof that Dodge remains completely unhinged. In 2013, its parent company Stellantis paid a record-high $236 million fine for failing to meet America's corporate average fuel economy regs. The obvious fix for getting in the government's good graces would be to build an EV, and hybrids and four-cylinders and smaller vehicles, for the crossover-loving masses. And yet, Dodge's answer is a tail-wagging, eardrum-thumping, three-ton, two-door car that starts at $61,590. Uncle Sam might have twisted Dodge's arm into building an EV, but it wasn't a government stooge that dreamed up an electric tribute to America's thirstiest performance cars with 670 horsepower and a donut mode. In a world where the EPA and CARB and CAFE don't exist, this car probably wouldn't exist, as an EV at least. Dodge might still be building carbureted V8s in that world, but that's not the reality you and I and Dodge live in. If you want a Charger muscle car to exist in 2024, there's gonna be an electric version. And so for that reason, whether you love it or hate it, if you think the sound is hokey, if you think the fact that it can't do burnouts is sad, I'm happy that this car exists, that there's still something that resembles an American muscle car on the market. That's what I wanna see.