Dodge Charger Daytona Is No Muscle Car—It's a Grand Tourer

A drive down modern-day Route 66 is improved by a healthy dose of imagination and a generous helping of nostalgia. The empty stretches and decaying buildings become remnants of a longed-for (and mostly imaginary) ideal past. It’s a good piece of road for the 2024 Dodge Charger Daytona Scat Pack, a lovely bit of futuristic design that, unlike Route 66, suffers under the heavy weight of nostalgia: Being compared to its namesakes, both long past and recently Hellcatted, sets a good car up for failure. It’s all about expectations. Come at the new Charger Daytona expecting a muscle car—and why wouldn’t you, when all of Dodge’s marketing has been touting the new model as the electric successor of the popular V-8 tire-fryers—and you’ll be deeply disappointed. This is not because this EV is a bad car, or even one that can’t live up to its storied past. It’s that Stellantis has given it the wrong past. This long, low two-door shouldn’t be saddled with carrying on the legacy of the muscle car, but instead with reviving the days when a medical convention would fill a parking lot with coupes the size of aircraft carriers, boasting the best badges of the day: Cadillac, Lincoln, and Chrysler. The new Charger isn’t a muscle car; it’s a full-size grand tourer.
Grand ProportionsTo start with, it’s bigger than the previous LX platform-based Charger. The Charger Daytona sits on a new platform—STLA Large—that even its naming acknowledges the size increase. It’s 206.6 inches long—that’s 5.6 inches longer than a 2023 Hellcat Charger—and sits astride a 121.0-inch wheelbase. The extra room adds gravitas to the exterior and noticeable rear-seat comfort to the interior, but it also piles on the pounds to a nameplate that wasn’t a lightweight to start with. One of the initial selling points of muscle cars in the 1960s was their power-to-weight ratio. The 2024 Charger has the power—a combined 670 horses and 627 pound-feet of torque—thanks to a 335-hp electric motor mounted on each axle, but it flattened our scales with 5925 pounds. That’s not just gravitas, it’s enough mass for gravitational pull. A bit of heft isn’t a bad thing in a big cruiser, but it’s the first ding against muscle-car status. HIGHS: Blistering acceleration, smooth and quiet, spacious interior.Next up is the way it drives, which is also un-muscle-car-like because it’s drama-free. Unlike a classic muscle machine on worn-out shocks, there will be no jitters or bumps that make it past the adaptive dampers that come with the $3995 Track Package—one of a couple significant bundles, the other being the comprehensive $4995 Plus Group, that’s mandatory on 2024 models like our test car. This car is smooth and quiet, assuming you haven’t turned on the silly Fratzonic “exhaust” speakers that surround the car inside and out with a booming faux-combustion rumble. We’ll come back to that.
James Lipman|Car and DriverThe Daytona skimmed the busted-up pavement of Route 66 like a skater on a recently Zambonied rink. Its big, optional Goodyear Eagle F1 SuperCar 3 summer tires (sized 305/35ZR-20 in front and 325/35ZR-20 in the rear) do catch and jiggle over the occasional pavement crack, but the car is quick to respond to steering corrections. In sweeping highway turns and busy city intersections, the Charger is unbothered and supremely comfortable. It stops surprisingly well considering its heft, taking only 151 feet to halt from 70 mph, which beats its gas-gulping predecessor by four feet, and lines up well against electric competitors from BMW and Hyundai (honking 16.1-inch brake rotors at each corner help). The Daytona allows for three levels of regenerative braking, controlled via paddles behind the steering wheel. Its size shows up in tighter corners, where it changes direction as needed but with obvious truculence. In testing, the Charger registered a respectable 0.96 g of grip on the skidpad, but it made us fight for it. Notes on the test numbers had three circles around the word “excessive” before “understeer.” To pull a phrase from the Charger’s long-ago NASCAR past, she pushes like a sun of a gun. So that, anyway, is a muscle-car trait, but it’s not one we’ve been longing to revisit. More on the Charger Daytona EVNow, it’s not that a muscle car needs to be uncomfortable. The last generation of Hellcat Challengers and Shelby Mustangs were pretty cushy, but they all had something the new Charger Daytona cannot match. No, not an internal-combustion engine. We’re not powerplant snobs. If an electric motor can propel us to 60 mph in 3.3 seconds and run a quarter-mile in 11.7 seconds as the Charger Daytona did in testing, we (mostly) don’t care what fuel is consumed to do it. The problem lies in the human-machine connection. A muscle car, a true muscle car, needs to have a sense of potential disaster about it. Driving it needs to offer the same frisson as standing on the edge of a cliff over a BASE jump or looking down at a plate of unshucked oysters on the Baja coast. It could be the best thing ever, or it could go terribly wrong, but you shouldn’t have time to think about it before taking the plunge. The true defining characteristic of a muscle car is that you can go from “all good” to “disturbing the peace” in the time it takes to say “Hold my beer.” If you need to pause and press buttons to get into Donut mode before you light the tires up in your neighbor’s cul-de-sac, well, that’s enough time to realize that it’s a dumb idea to light up the tires up in your neighbor’s cul-de-sac. The real reason the Daytona isn’t a muscle car is not its zero-to-60-mph time but its zero-to-burnout time. LOWS: Fussy modes to unlock max performance, plentiful understeer, so much weight.The Charger Daytona shouldn’t be lined up against previous Chargers, it should be compared to other grand electrics. Our car’s as-tested $86,660 sticker is a bit eye-watering, but next to a Lucid Air Touring (620 horsepower, $80,400 to start) or a Mercedes EQS580 4Matic (536 horsepower, $129,870), it offers similar or better performance numbers, standout looks, and a competitive price.
Range and ChargingThe Daytona isn’t the most impressive in terms of range or charge times, however. Dodge’s choice of a 400-volt architecture and a 94-kWh battery mean the Daytona can’t charge as quickly as 800-volt competitors, and a Scat Pack model on summer tires like ours is EPA-rated for only 216 miles on a full charge. Yet we found it filled up from 50 to 80-plus percent at a 350-kW fast-charging station in less time than it took us to get coffee, and we were able to live out all our Pixar Cars fantasies on Route 66 and still have plenty of juice to make it back to civilization.
We’ve read complaints about the Charger’s interior, and perhaps the base trim fails to impress, but we found the Scat Pack’s optional Carbon and Suede package ($2995) made for an impressive sight upon opening the Charger’s elongated doors. Watch yourself in tight spaces, though, as this Charger may not drive like it’s enormous, but it’s plenty huge in parking lots. One of the benefits of big size is the Daytona’s hatchback trunk, which calls up memories of the long bubble backs of the first-gen Charger. It’s the perfect height for filling with groceries, garden supplies, or road-trip luggage. If you are the car-camping type, the rear seats easily fold flat and the Daytona could absolutely host a sleepover. The Charger Daytona has struggled to find an audience so far, and we blame Dodge’s insistence on placing the Daytona in muscle-car territory. Trying to shove it into that category by using tricks like the 40-hp PowerShot button to unlock its full 670 ponies, or needing Donut or Drift mode to make tire smoke and fake engine sounds that invoke the rumble of a gas-burner—which, for the record, several friends and family members loved, so grain-of-salt that complaint—work against it with the customers who want hooliganism at a toe-tap. Gimmicks make this car seem silly to customers who might appreciate its beautiful styling, smoothness, and lavish comfort. It’s a bad Dodge Charger, but the 2024 Daytona Scat Pack would have made a fantastic Chrysler Imperial. VERDICT: A fine EV, forced to cosplay as a muscle car.SpecificationsSpecifications
2024 Dodge Charger Daytona Scat Pack
Vehicle Type: front- and rear-motor, all-wheel-drive, 5-passenger, 2-door hatchback
PRICE

Base/As Tested: $78,680/$86,660
Options: Carbon and Suede package (carbon-fiber exterior mirror lamps with logo projection, darkened exterior badges, black-painted 20-inch wheels, carbon-fiber and suede-wrapped instrument panel, leather and suede performance seats, carbon-fiber door panel inserts, suede headliner, carbon-fiber interior accents), $2995; Sun and Sound package (full glass roof, 18-speaker Alpine audio system with subwoofer), $2495; Drive eXperience recorder, $1000; Triple Nickel paint, $795; summer performance tires, $695
POWERTRAIN

Front Motor: permanent-magnet synchronous AC, 335 hp, 314 lb-ft
Rear Motor: permanent-magnet synchronous AC, 335 hp, 314 lb-ft
Combined Power: 670 hp
Combined Torque: 627 lb-ft
Battery Pack: liquid-cooled lithium-ion, 94 kWh
Onboard Charger: 11.0 kW
Peak DC Fast-Charge Rate: 183 kW
Transmissions, F/R: direct-drive
CHASSIS

Suspension, F/R: multilink/multilink
Brakes, F/R: 16.1-in vented disc/16.1-in vented disc
Tires: Goodyear Eagle F1 SuperCar 3
305/35ZR-20 107Y
325/35ZR-20 108Y
DIMENSIONS

Wheelbase: 121.0 in
Length: 206.6 in
Width: 79.8 in
Height: 59.0 in
Passenger Volume, F/R: 57/46 ft3
Cargo Volume, Behind F/R: 37/23 ft3
Curb Weight: 5925 lb
C/D TEST RESULTS

60 mph: 3.3 sec
100 mph: 8.0 sec
1/4-Mile: 11.7 sec @ 119 mph
130 mph: 14.5 sec
Results above omit 1-ft rollout of 0.3 sec.
Rolling Start, 5–60 mph: 4.1 sec
Top Gear, 30–50 mph: 1.8 sec
Top Gear, 50–70 mph: 2.4 sec
Top Speed (gov ltd): 136 mph
Braking, 70–0 mph: 151 ft
Braking, 100–0 mph: 297 ft
Roadholding, 300-ft Skidpad: 0.96 g
EPA FUEL ECONOMY

Combined/City/Highway: 70/74/66 MPGe
Range: 216 mi
C/D TESTING EXPLAINEDLike a sleeper agent activated late in the game, Elana Scherr didn’t know her calling at a young age. Like many girls, she planned to be a vet-astronaut-artist, and came closest to that last one by attending UCLA art school. She painted images of cars, but did not own one. Elana reluctantly got a driver’s license at age 21 and discovered that she not only loved cars and wanted to drive them, but that other people loved cars and wanted to read about them, which meant somebody had to write about them. Since receiving activation codes, Elana has written for numerous car magazines and websites, covering classics, car culture, technology, motorsports, and new-car reviews. In 2020, she received a Best Feature award from the Motor Press Guild for the C/D story “A Drive through Classic Americana in a Polestar 2.”  In 2023, her Car and Driver feature story “In Washington, D.C.’s Secret Carpool Cabal, It’s a Daily Slug Fest” was awarded 1st place in the 16th Annual National Arts & Entertainment Journalism Awards by the Los Angeles Press Club.
 
Source: caranddriver.com