Can the 2026 Dodge Charger Daytona EV Do Woodward Dream Cruise?

Key Points in This Article:

• The electric Charger Daytona hasn’t gone over well with Dodge fans, with sluggish sales since its late-2024 launch.
• But even at the nostalgia-laden Woodward Dream Cruise, the Charger Daytona still turned heads.
• A few key changes to the car’s Fratzonic Chambered Exhaust system would make this EV even more compelling.

The Woodward Dream Cruise is perhaps the quintessential celebration of American car culture. Every third weekend in August for the past 30 years, nearly 1.5 million people and some 40,000 classic, muscle, hot rod, exotic and specialty cars gather on a 16-mile stretch of suburban Detroit’s Woodward Avenue and hold the world’s largest one-day automotive-themed gathering. Automakers sponsor massive displays and people dust off their cars and hit the boulevard to pay tribute to a nostalgic time in the 1950s and ‘60s when cruising Woodward Ave. was what you did on a Saturday night, enjoying the drive-in restaurants, movie theatres, and just to see and be seen in a sweet ride.

Related: 2026 Dodge Charger: Jumpin’ Sixpack, It’s a Gas, Gas, Gas!

It’s a celebration of horsepower, art, creativity and, more than anything, the American propensity for loud, gas-powered speed — which makes what I drove this year particularly curious: a 2026 Dodge Charger Daytona EV four-door. I’ve attended every Woodward Dream Cruise since the first one in 1994 (it was canceled only once, in 2020, due to the COVID-19 pandemic), and I’ve done it in a hot Mopar every single time. But I’d never done it in an electric car, and I was curious to see what the car enthusiast public’s reaction would be to the first-ever electric muscle car.

The Ride in Question: Electric Muscle

When Dodge discontinued the old Hemi-powered Challenger and Charger back in 2023, the brand’s star performance twins had become synonymous with relatively inexpensive, accessible, everyman speed … which is why their replacement made a lot of folks scratch their heads. The 2024 Dodge Charger Daytona looked incredible — it was styled like a fully modernized 1968 throwback — but swapping out the iconic Hemi V-8 engine for all-electric power was a move everyone felt was likely to be brand suicide. Sad to say, that prognostication has thus far proven correct: Through the first six months of 2025, Dodge has sold barely 4,300 Charger EVs, a fraction of what the prior gas-powered models sold. That works out to about two sales per Dodge dealer  across the country, all year. Yikes.

Help is on the way in the form of a gas-powered Charger with the new Hurricane twin-turbo inline-six-cylinder engine, which is dubbed Sixpack here. But that’s still not the Hemi everyone knew and loved, and it’s unlikely to command the same fanatical following despite the Hurricane’s superiority in every quantifiable measure (except exhaust noise).

In the electric Charger, Dodge tried to mitigate the “emotional allergies” caused by swapping out the Hemi by including something it calls Fratzonic Chambered Exhaust — essentially, an external speaker mounted under the car that creates a very loud fake “exhaust noise” tied to the car’s acceleration. You can also “rev” it while parked, and it’s as loud as the old supercharged Dodge Challenger Hellcat’s exhaust was, matching it for audacity if not authenticity.

So, with the third week of August upon us, Dodge loaned me a new 2026 Charger Daytona Scat Pack four-door. We’d seen the two-door coupe before, but the four-door is brand-new for ‘26, and is arriving in dealerships. The “Daytona” trim denotes it being electric, and the Scat Pack name means it’s the high-performance version (the R/T has been discontinued for the electric Charger but will be returning as the lower trim for the gas-powered models early in 2026). Using a dual-motor setup for all-wheel drive, the Charger Daytona Scat Pack comes with 670 horsepower and the ability to get from 0-60 mph in 3.3 seconds, according to Dodge. Its 241 miles of estimated range, however, isn’t all that much to talk about.

Despite its staggering 5,828-pound base curb weight, the Charger Daytona four-door is brutally quick, handles well and has a sizable interior that’s comfortable for four people. It’s a big car — bigger than the old Charger four-door, and with fastback-hatchback styling that gives it extra utility. It is also expensive: $80,465  as tested (including destination fee). That puts it out of reach of a lot of former Charger and Challenger buyers, but it isn’t really all that much more than the old Hellcat Widebody models used to cost. Simply put, the ‘26 Charger Daytona Scat Pack is a beast, a hefty presence in traffic that turns heads far, far more frequently than I expected it to.

‘Hey, What Is That?!’

Sitting at the stoplight in the Charger Daytona, I heard the honking first. Looking out my driver’s side window, the shirtless middle-aged guy next to me in the old, beat-up beige Chevrolet Suburban towing a bunch of lawn equipment was frantically motioning for me to put my window down. I did, and he immediately yelled across: “What is that?” That a man who I’d have guessed would be very familiar with the traditional Dodge lineup actually had no idea what the new Charger looked like made me wince inwardly. That cannot be a good sign, I thought.

Sure enough, the novelty of the new Charger Daytona became evident when I took it out to Woodward Avenue on Thursday night prior to the Saturday night main event. The Dream Cruise is now a weeklong event with people cruising every night, with less traffic and smaller crowds allowing for actual cruising versus sitting in gridlock traffic on Saturday. And everywhere I took the Charger, all up and down the 16-mile stretch of onlooker-lined boulevard, it drew immediate pointing, excited exclamations and shock (no pun intended).

This kind of reaction is not entirely surprising, either, because for the entirety of the Woodward Dream Cruise weekend, I did not see another new Charger Daytona out cruising. The fact that the Charger Daytona has been out for nearly a year now (it was introduced in late 2024 as a ‘24 model) and that it had zero public presence at America’s greatest celebration of muscle cars and power tells you just how badly Dodge product planning under European Stellantis management got it wrong.

But there is hope for the Charger, and it comes in the form of the actual, genuine interest everyone showed in my bright blue bomber. The number of exclamations of “Oh! That’s the new Charger four-door!” and people stopping in their tracks to get a better look tells me there’s definite enthusiast interest in the new car … but not its electric powertrain. And after driving it through the world’s biggest cruise-in, I think I know why.

Fratzonic Doesn’t Work Quite Right

I like the Fratzonic Chambered Exhaust. It adds a level of silliness to an already absurdly proportioned, equipped and priced vehicle that actually does resonate well with the general public. No really, it does! The number of people who asked to hear it, or who giggled when I activated it, was considerable. It’s not the first EV to make fake powertrain noises tied to a drive mode and linked to the vehicle’s acceleration; that would be the Hyundai Ioniq 5 N. But here’s the problem with the Charger’s system: It doesn’t work as well as the Hyundai’s does, and that’s because it doesn’t properly emulate a gas engine’s characteristics like the Hyundai system does. There are three specific areas that make it unpleasant to use instead of a surprise-and-delight feature.

First, the loudness and activation of the Fratzonic system is tied to specific drive modes. If you’re just driving around normally, in one of the normal modes, you can’t switch it on independently (but you can completely shut it off for totally silent running). It’s louder in Sport mode and loudest in Track and Drag modes. This does somewhat emulate real exhaust systems that open additional flaps and valves when you activate sportier drive modes, but there’s no reason it shouldn’t be completely independent of drive modes here. Sometimes, you want the noise without the Drag drive mode changing everything else about the car’s behavior. Fix No. 1: Decouple Fratzonic from the drive modes and make it independently selectable.

Second, when you’re accelerating, the Fratzonic “engine noise” rises with your speed … and stays there. If it was a gas car, you’d be yelling “Shift, shift!” and thinking something was wrong with your transmission, or that the nut behind the wheel doesn’t know how to drive a stick shift. It’s almost like a continuously variable transmission’s soundtrack, where the CVT brings an engine to an optimal rpm and keeps it there. It feels unnatural and is unpleasant to listen to if you’re cruising at higher speeds. Fix No. 2: Fratzonic exhaust sounds are fake anyway, so add fake transmission shift points as part of the acceleration noise to keep it sounding realistic.

Third, while you can “rev” the exhaust sound when the gear selector is in Park, you can’t when you’re in Neutral. Anyone cruising a boulevard past people who want to hear your car rev, fake or not, knows that you need to be able to put the car in Neutral, let it coast and give the accelerator pedal a few stabs to entertain the audience. Can’t do that in the Charger Daytona; it makes no noise when you do, making this an inadequate cruise-night car for that reason. Fix No. 3: Allow drivers to “rev” the Fratzonic system while the car is rolling along in Neutral.

There’s Certainly Potential

While some Dodge fanboys might never accept the idea of an electric muscle car, the idea is not without some promise. The Charger Daytona is the first of its kind and has largely been shunned by the traditional muscle-car buyer, but that doesn’t mean a revamped electric Dodge muscle car doesn’t have a future. Putting the gasoline Hurricane engine in the Charger might help the Charger (even though it’s still not a Hemi), but the electrification of Dodge needs to happen without electric powertrains replacing the gas engines its customers crave.

The few fixes to the current electric Charger Daytona listed above would go a long way toward helping to establish its credibility with enthusiasts, and the beautiful part is that it wouldn’t require any hardware changes. It’s all just software controlling the noise the Charger makes, and it shouldn’t be a huge deal to modify.

But to truly establish the Dodge brand as a purveyor of electric sports machines, a rethink needs to happen regarding what the brand stands for and how an EV fits into it. A lighter, cheaper, more forward-looking sports car with a new name would likely be a better idea than trying to make the Charger an EV. Let the Charger go back to being a proper gas-powered muscle car suitable for cruise nights, and bring us something truly new for Dodge’s next chapter.

More Dodge Charger News From Cars.com:

• 2026 Dodge Charger Sixpack: Are Six Cylinders Enough or Does It Need a V-8?
• Dodge Adds Sedan to 2026 Charger Daytona EV Lineup
• 2024 Dodge Charger Daytona Scat Pack Review: Identity Crisis
• Going for 10.6: Drag-Strip Testing the 2021 Dodge Charger SRT Hellcat Redeye
• Research the Dodge Charger Daytona

Related Video:

Cars.com’s Editorial department is your source for automotive news and reviews. In line with Cars.com’s long-standing ethics policy, editors and reviewers don’t accept gifts or free trips from automakers. The Editorial department is independent of Cars.com’s advertising, sales and sponsored content departments.