Driven! The 2024 Dodge Charger Daytona Muscles into the Electric Era

A burger without beef. Fourth of July without fireworks. A muscle car without a V-8. Some people call those oxymorons, and five years ago, the horsepower mongers at Dodge probably would have agreed—at least on the muscle cars. Now they need to convince red-blooded Americans that a Hemi-less Charger can still raise hell.

Enter the electric 2024 Dodge Charger Daytona with as much as 670 horsepower, an available Donut mode, and a subwoofer on the outside of the car. Obnoxiously loud, outrageously huge, objectively quick, and capable of vaporizing its own tires, the Charger Daytona aims to bring Dodge’s unique brand of muscle car energy to the EV world.

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Crazy. Stupid. Love?

When Daytonas start popping up at dealers, they’ll come in two types of crazy and only with two doors. The $75,185 Scat Pack splits 670 horsepower and 627 lb-ft of torque between front and rear motors. Six-piston front brakes come standard, and all first-year Scat Packs include the Track package, which adds adaptive dampers, four-piston rear brakes, staggered-width tires on 20-inch wheels, and a rear spoiler. It also gets Track, Drag, and Drift/Donut modes, plus launch control and a Race Prep function that conditions the battery for optimal performance.

Dodge says all that’s good for 0–60 mph in 3.3 seconds and a quarter mile in 11.5 seconds, a claim that held up during a 11.47-second run at 119.5 mph on an unprepped dragstrip at Firebird Motorsports Park. If the Scat Pack can repeat that performance on a street surface, it will easily walk every 797-hp Challenger Hellcat Redeye that MotorTrend has ever tested.

The R/T models use the same powertrain hardware but run software that limits the output to 496 horsepower and 404 lb-ft of torque, which takes a big bite out of the 0–60 time at a claimed 4.7 seconds. With square-fitment 245/55R18 all-season tires and none of the Scat Pack’s funhouse drive modes, the most nutty thing about the R/T is how massive it is. The Daytona coupe measures longer than the three-row Chevy Traverse, and at the advertised 5,750 pounds, the R/T weighs a half-ton more than a Tesla Model S Plaid. Scat Packs add another 150 pounds.

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The Deafening Silence

Because permanent-magnet motors sound as menacing as a microwave, both the R/T and Scat Pack announce their presence with a synthetic soundtrack. What Dodge calls the “Fratzonic chambered exhaust” is actually two speakers driven by a dedicated 600-watt amp and mounted in a 1.5-cubic-foot enclosure hung under the back of the car. The temptation to pull a Milli Vanilli using the Hellcat’s back catalog must have been strong, but the NVH team instead went for deeper cuts by sampling the exhaust note of every museum car kept in the old Conner Avenue assembly plant where the Viper was once built.

Strangely—or maybe not—what they landed on sounds like it’s coming from three distinct vehicles. On startup and shutdown, you can hear echoes of the Chrysler Turbine Car winding up into a futuristic harmonic that resembles a Dolby sound check. “Revving” the Daytona in park sounds like a low-fi sound effect from an ’80s arcade game. And at idle and under load, the Daytona mimics a combustion car with a deep thrum at the same 38-hertz primary frequency as the original Hemi engine—cranked up to the same decibel level of the Hellcat Redeye in Track and Drag modes. If the whole idea sounds like something a 16-year-old would do, well isn’t that kind of the point? And even if Dodge’s execution leaves plenty of room for improvement, they did get the most important part right: You can switch it off if you really hate it.

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Doing the Electric Slide

Aside from blasting the neighborhood with bass, there’s only so much you can do to make an EV feel feral. The two-motor, all-wheel-drive powertrain splits power and torque 50/50 between the front and rear axles. Fed to the road through a gear ratio that’s taller than a Hellcat’s first gear, each motor’s 314 lb-ft peak is hardly the stuff of a tire-smoking burnout machine. In fact, the Charger Daytona won’t do a burnout. No matter what we tried, the electric Charger stubbornly rejected our efforts to announce its arrival to the world via smoke signals. It’s probably capable of doing one with a line lock feature, but inexplicably that’s the one toy Dodge failed to program in.

Tire slayers will instead have to resort to the Drift/Donut mode, which sends stability control on a lunch break and biases 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, the inside front wheel occasionally starts furiously spinning in the middle of a tail-out slide. Mostly, though, it’s hilarious fun and a decent consolation prize for the whole not-doing-a-burnout thing. Keep your eyes peeled for an unofficial demonstration in the parking lot of a big box store near you.

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The Benefits of Going Electric

On the road, there’s no hiding that the electric Charger is a civilized—almost luxurious—ride. Rough pavement and hard impacts are quickly and deftly controlled both by the Scat Pack’s adaptive dampers and the R/T’s passive shocks. Switch the soundtrack off, and you’ll marvel at how quiet the cabin is at highway speeds. (Tesla could learn something from Dodge about how to seal frameless side windows.)

The real revelation, though, is that Dodge’s electric muscle car is also in its element when the road goes wiggly. The Challenger’s old bones were designed and engineered long before anyone knew Dodge was going to unleash a 797-hp supercharged V-8 on the world. Engineers had to make the best of what they were given starting with the very first SRT-8 models back in 2004. This time around, the structure was designed for the most powerful version coming later. As a result, the Daytona’s body is 23 percent stiffer than the Challenger’s, and bolting the battery into the floor raises that to 50 percent.

Combine that with its balanced weight and torque distribution, and the Daytona feels like an entirely different beast than the car it replaces. On the track, the Challenger was always too heavy, too soft, and too uncoordinated. It perpetuated decades-old stereotypes years after the Camaro and Mustang had proved it was possible to make an American muscle car dance. Finally, Dodge joins the party. The Daytona defies its three-ton heft with responsive steering and flat body control. Instead of swinging between understeer and oversteer at the limit, it now balances on the limit with a satisfying neutral tack. If the Daytona was just a quarter-inch wider, it would have to wear the amber marker lights you see on Raptor and Rebel trucks, yet it never feels clumsily large or heavy.

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If Looks Could Thrill

But perhaps it doesn’t even matter how the Daytona drives, given how awesome it looks. Even as the wheelbase grows 5 inches relative the Challenger, Dodge has rebuked the convention of pushing an EV’s wheels to the corners. The traditional front and rear overhangs give the Daytona the stance and presence of a combustion car. (Gas-powered Chargers that drop the Daytona name in favor of "Sixpack" and adopt the Hurricane twin-turbo inline-six will go on sale in the second half of 2025, along with four-door versions of both Daytona and Sixpack.) Vertical fascias with strong horizontal elements inspired by the 1968 Charger give it a classic look while the R-wing pass-through at the leading edge of the hood gives it a futuristic vibe.

The generous exterior dimensions make the Daytona the Chevy Suburban of two-door cars from the inside. More so than the biggish Challenger it replaces, the Daytona is positively cavernous. 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. With the wheelbase growing 5 inches compared to the Challenger, there’s room for a 6-foot, 3-inch passenger in the back with legroom to spare. The hidden hatchback also makes it surprisingly practical. The rear can hold up to 22.8 cubic feet of cargo while the 1.5-cubic-foot frunk can swallow a backpack or a small duffel bag.

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How Is It as an EV?

Dodge wants shoppers to think of the Daytona as a muscle car first and an EV somewhere after that, but even the most loyal Mopar fans will want to consider the usual range and charging questions. Scat Pack models extract 241 miles from the 100.5-kWh battery pack on all-season tires or 216 miles with the $695 summer tire upgrade. If you’re willing to accept the performance hit, R/T models manage to stretch the same battery to an impressive 308 miles. On road trips, the R/T’s long legs will be constrained by a peak charging power of 183 kW, which is good but not great. Dodge claims the battery can be charged from 5 to 80 percent in less than 33 minutes.

EV enthusiasts will likely be disappointed that there’s no true one-pedal driving mode. Paddle shifters allow the driver to toggle between three levels of regenerative braking (equal to 0.3, 0.2, and 0.1 g of deceleration), but Dodge hasn’t programmed the most aggressive mode to bring the vehicle to a stop. Once you hit about 7 mph, the deceleration disappears and the Daytona coasts, requiring the driver to bring the vehicle to a halt.

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One of these EVs Is Unlike the Others

The Charger Daytona is a powerful yet comfortable road runner that’s equally at home rocketing down a laser-straight desert highway or chasing apexes up a canyon road. While Dodge’s efforts to invent an electric muscle car are noble and do enhance the experience, Hyundai’s Ioniq 5 N is still the benchmark for an engaging, fun-to-drive EV. We wish the Daytona’s rear motor delivered more torque than the front at full whack—and that we had the ability to spin the tires at will. And if Dodge can offer new “exhaust” signatures as over-the-air updates, it can probably find the right note to silence the haters.

Even without hearing or driving this car, we could have held the Charger Daytona up as proof that Dodge remains completely unhinged. In 2023, its parent company, Stellantis, paid a record-high $236 million fine for failing to meet America’s Corporate Average Fuel Economy regulations. 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. Something like a Ford Mustang Mach-E. 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. That Dodge continues to do whatever the hell it wants, logic be damned, is exactly what we need from EVs right now.