Pros

1. Ridiculously quick
2. Fratzonic “exhaust” sound system is surprisingly convincing
3. Magnificent interior

Cons

1. Short driving range
2. Slow charging
3. Unable to create massive clouds of tire smoke

When the all-new 2024 Dodge Charger Daytona, Stellantis’ all-electric muscle car, arrived at MotorTrend HQ, one of us sent a photo to a Mopar fanatic friend. “The Hemiheads will never go for it, no matter how good it is,” he replied. He’s probably right: Die-hard muscle car fanatics are unlikely to accept the new 2024 Dodge Charger, or any electric vehicle, as a proper muscle car. But will they be able to make a solid argument against the Charger’s claim to musclehood? We doubt it.

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What makes a muscle car a muscle car?

The primary measure of any muscle car is muscle, and you can’t say the new electric Charger is lacking in that arena. The two-motor Charger Daytona Scat Pack delivers up to 670 horsepower and 627 lb-ft of torque. “Up to”? Where’s that asterisk? Here it is: Nominal output is 630 hp, with a Power Shot button on the steering wheel that gives a 40-hp boost for 10–15 seconds. Even the lower 630-hp figure is a number that back in the 1960s was, if not exactly unobtainable, certainly not possible in any street vehicle that would idle for more than five minutes without blowing a radiator hose and fouling its plugs. No worries about that in the Charger Daytona, which has no spark plugs and does not idle (though it pretends to, as we’ll discuss in a minute).

Hemi fanatics sure as hell can’t argue against the new electric Charger on acceleration. Back in the muscle car’s heyday, a 14-second quarter mile was considered quick for a showroom-stock vehicle, and a few ill-tempered examples could break into the high 12s. In our modern testing, the 2024 Charger Daytona ran the quarter mile in 11.5 seconds with a 120.5-mph trap speed. To get that kind of time out of a 1968 Dodge Hemi Charger, you’d have to hack off most of the bodywork and add another pair of carburetors, preferably with a second 426 Hemi V-8 still attached to them. And since we tend to talk in 0–60 rather than quarter miles nowadays, how’s 3.2 seconds grab you? That’s what the Charger accomplished in our testing, with no wheelspin and a surprisingly docile, drama-free launch. It takes a master driver to launch a 426 Hemi-powered Charger without melting the tires, but anyone can do it in the new electric Charger.

The muscle car strut

A muscle car must have attitude, and the new Charger has one like we’ve never seen — or heard. Enter the Fratzonic chambered exhaust, which is a subwoofer bolted under the rear bumper that broadcasts fake exhaust noises. Yeah, it’s a gimmick, and a silly one at that, but we’ll be damned if it isn’t convincing. Frankly, we’re a bit embarrassed at the way the explosive startup sound made us grin, delighted as we were with both the fidelity and the stupidity of it.

Still, when we sat at a stoplight, with the grumbling speaker gently imparting its vibration to the whole car, we could easily believe there was a big-cube V-8 engine under the hood rather than a storage bin. Stand behind an idling V-8 Ford Mustang and an “idling” Charger Daytona, and they sound pretty darn similar. We’re pretty sure future generations will regard phony engine sounds the way we regard wood-trim vinyl appliqués today, but that doesn’t dim the Fratzonic’s here-and-now cool factor.

A serious old-timey enthusiast might use the Charger’s good handling as an argument against muscle car status; after all, muscle cars were straight-line machines, with suspension setups just good enough to get themselves out of your driveway and wrapped around the nearest telephone pole. It’s true, the 0.99 g of skidpad grip generated by our summer-tire-shod Charger test car is the kind of figure no bias-ply-tired 1960s muscle machine could match. And we doubt many — any? — of them could make it around our figure-eight handling test in 24.1 seconds like the electric Charger did. (Actually, we bet there are a few classic muscle cars that couldn’t make it around our figure eight at all.) But the Charger was hardly graceful: It understeered relentlessly and would not apply full power until the steering wheel was straight (thank you, electronic nannies). Something was up with the brakes in our test Charger; the front wheels locked up every time we braked into the curve, and they even locked during one of our straight-line braking runs. (That said, a tidy 104-foot stop from 60 mph proves there’s something better than the original Charger’s non-assisted drums behind those wheels.) Overall, we didn’t find as much joy in the curves as we hoped. So yes, this is a straight-line machine, as a muscle car should be.

Can we talk about the Charger’s styling?

A muscle car must look properly cool, and we think the new Charger does. Seventeen years ago (goodness gracious, has it been that long?), Dodge stunned us by making a new Challenger that was damn close to a dead ringer for the 1970 original. The new Charger takes a different route by embodying the whole history of that storied model. Check out the fast backlight from the 1966–’67 Charger, the broad, flat-topped quarter panels from the ’68–’70 Charger, and the Coke-bottle lines of the ’71–’74 Charger. The front fenders even pay homage to the 2006 Charger. (Surely, we all agree the ’75–’78 and ’82–’87 Chargers are, for the moment, best forgotten. OK, maybe not the Shelby version.) There are some nifty new touches, too, like the R-wing front end with a hood that dips down under a leading-edge spoiler. Such an arrangement could easily have looked silly, but Dodge designers and engineers integrated it beautifully into the new Charger’s design.

Surely the purists won’t complain about the Charger’s high-class interior, maybe the best we’ve seen from a Dodge in … well, come to think of it, ever. We love the way the ambient lighting reflects into the gray carbon-fiber-pattern trim that surrounds the dashboard, enhancing the floating-dash effect. The screens are laid out sensibly and within easy reach, the transmission shifter is a neat new interpretation of the classic Mopar pistol grip, and the squared-off steering wheel is a nifty callback to the “squircles” Chrysler used in the 1960s. The back seat is generous, and the hatchback trunk makes loading easy. The old muscleheads might have something to say about the upcoming four-door Charger, and we’ll cross that bridge when we come to it — but how classic-throwback is it to have two- and four-door versions of the same body?

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Where the Charger slows down

Anyone arguing against an EV is going to talk about range, and here the Charger doesn’t make much of a case for itself. The EPA-rated range for the Scat Pack version is 241 miles, but the summer tires drop that to 216, and we only managed 185 miles in our Road-Trip Range test, which involves topping off the battery and driving 70 mph until the state of charge drops to 5 percent. Sure, classic muscle cars aren’t exactly long-legged; they drain their passenger-car-size fuel tanks with alacrity. Drive a 5.0-liter Mustang the way it wants to be driven, and good luck getting much more than 250 miles between fill-ups. But you can refill the Mustang in minutes, and charging is one place where the Charger goes slow. With a 400-volt electrical system, as opposed to the 800-volt systems found in many other new EVs, a quarter hour on the cord only added 66 miles to the Charger’s near-empty battery (a state from which it should charge the quickest). Half an hour of charging added a total of 115 miles, and 60 minutes yielded 166 miles. It took a long 72 minutes to top off the battery. Not good, Dodge. Not good at all. (Dodge tells us the SRT version will have an 800-volt architecture.)

Another point where the purists score: The 2024 Dodge Charger Daytona, as we tested it, cannot do a real burnout. We tried, goodness knows, using every electronic mode on offer, including Donut mode, but the best we could get was a whiff of smoke from the front tires. We were baffled; motor control is a software function, and surely Dodge could have programmed a burnout function, sending peak power to the rear motor and perhaps locking the front brakes for good measure. (After all, the front brakes locked when we didn’t want them to.) Dodge chief Matt McAlear later explained to us how physics work against the Scat Pack frying its own tires, but said the upcoming SRT version will be able to do a proper radial roast.

What is left to argue against the new Charger’s status as a proper muscle car? We must talk about the elephant in the room, or perhaps we should say the lack of an elephant motor under the hood. Proper muscle cars are supposed to have V-8 engines — but, really, are they? Back in the 1960s, the best technology for making massive tire-frying power was lots of cubic inches fed by huge carburetors that could flow cubic miles of air into them. Today, the electric motor is the best technology for big power come easy. If modern advances in batteries, computers, and software had come in the 1960s, isn’t it possible automakers would have built electric muscle cars back then? Certainly, if they wanted to win at the dragstrip, they would have.

This Charger is a real muscle car, deal with it

All that said, we know our Mopar maniac friend is right: The Hemiheads are unlikely to accept the 2024 Dodge Charger Daytona Scat Pack as a proper muscle car. We can present them with all the facts, and many of them will simply say, “It just isn’t.”

Well, lack of burnouts and slow charging aside, we say the Charger is a proper muscle car, one that will do nearly all the things a classic muscle car will do — and do most of them better. To the purists who disagree, save your ire for the upcoming Hurricane-powered Charger Sixpack. A muscle car with a straight-six engine? No way. No way.

Photos by William Walker