The most controversial car of 2024 isn’t the Tesla Cybertruck or whatever cool new BMW you think is ugly, it’s the Dodge Charger Daytona EV. This electric muscle car is so plagued by anti-woke culture bullshit that it had to be saddled with a gas engine option while the EV seems a bit doomed to fail. Still, after seeing it at the Los Angeles Auto Show I’m stoked to drive the electric Charger, and couldn’t really care less about what the gas one is like. The prospect of an electric muscle car is exciting to me, and I think think the Charger’s design is a home run. More importantly, it’s really the rebirth of the American “personal luxury coupe” that enthusiasts have lamented the death of for decades now, with a ton of space and practicality.
Dodge is replacing both the two-door Challenger and four-door Charger with the new Charger, which is available with two or four doors. Unlike either of the outgoing models, the Charger has a liftback instead of a trunk for both the coupe and sedan. The two models have the same 121.0-inch wheelbase, and they’re huge — the coupe is 206.6 inches long, which is six inches longer than the old Charger and nine inches longer than the Challenger. It’s wide as hell too, almost two inches wider than the widebody versions of the old cars.
In person under auto show lighting, I think the Charger looks great and has a ton of presence. Sure, it could do with even bigger wheels and a better offset, and I bet on a smaller wheel and tire package it will look kinda dinky, but the base versions of the old cars did too. The coke bottle shape of the body and fenders is really nice, and the greenhouse doesn’t look too tall and boxy. You might never guess it had a hatch.
It’s inside the new Charger where I was truly surprised. Not by the design itself, though it is certainly leagues nicer than the old cars when it comes to design, materials and technology, but by how roomy and airy it felt. The Challenger was a truly challenging car to see out of, with a gigantic long nose, tiny side windows and a tall body; the Charger wasn’t much better. Forward visibility seems much improved from the old cars, especially thanks to the EV’s R-Wing hood design, and thanks to taller windows and a bigger quarter window behind the doors it has less of a blind spot.
That larger side quarter window is also of huge benefit to passengers in the rear seat, which is immensely spacious. It’s easy to fold and slide the front bucket seats forward, and ingress and egress for the back seat is a lot nicer. Dodge hasn’t released dimensions yet, but at 5-foot-9 I have vastly more headroom and legroom than in the old Challenger, and it honestly seemed nicer than the Charger’s back seat. It didn’t feel too dark or claustrophobic in the back, and I bet the optional panoramic roof would add to the airiness (and I doubt it will reduce headroom by a meaningful amount). The biggest shock? Our own 6-foot-8-inch staff writer Logan Carter fit in the back seat.
I think the best part of the new Charger is the cargo area. It is simply massive and extremely usable. The liftback’s opening is wide and squared-off with a fairly low sill, and even with the rear seats up the cargo area is really long and pretty tall despite the sloping roof. There’s 22.8 cubic feet of space with the seats up, 6.3 more than the old Charger and 6.6 more than the Challenger, and the rear seats fold down almost completely flat to increase the cargo area to 37.4 cubic feet. Ren Stone, manager of Advanced Design at Stellantis, made an Instagram post of a Charger EV easily hauling a 40-by-64-inch box with a Viper windshield in it. The Charger EV can be had with a frunk, but at 1.5 cubic feet it’s fairly small, and you have to go for one of the expensive option packages to get it.
Everyone is constantly sad about how coupes and other niche body styles are dying in the U.S., and how there are no big coupes that can be really used as a daily driven family car like the enormous personal luxury coupes of yore (yore being, like, the ‘70s and ‘80s), but here Dodge comes bringing them back with force. The Challenger was too compromised by its design to really be practical, but I can easily see the new Charger being owned by someone with a kid or two, or a big dog, or a job that regularly requires them to haul stuff, or even someone single who hits the vintage furniture markets too often and has friends to drive around. In a world of crossovers where even sedans are becoming increasingly uncommon, the existence of a big coupe like the 2024 Charger should be celebrated.
