The 550-Horsepower Dodge Charger SIXPACK Scat Pack Is Punchy But Oh-So-Compromised

It’s safe to say that the new Dodge Charger wasn’t exactly born smoothly. An EV-first launch generated considerable backlash among a fray of V8-loving enthusiasts, and it didn’t help that the most potent electric model won’t do a burnout. So what happens when you yank out the batteries and drop in a 550-horsepower twin-turbocharged straight-six? You get the Charger Sixpack Scat Pack, a new-age Dodge aimed at people who have 93-octane coursing through their veins.

Our first outing in the new twin-turbocharged straight-six-powered Dodge Charger was a bit unusual. With snowy Vermont as the backdrop, my colleague Mercedes hooned it so hard that the powertrain went into heat protection mode. Promising muscle car stuff, but an infotainment glitch didn’t instill huge confidence, and winter driving isn’t always the best representation of other conditions. The initial impression was that of a fun but flawed machine, so what happens when Mother Nature thaws the landscape? I booked a summer week in the Charger Sixpack Scat Pack to find out.

[Full disclosure: Dodge Canada let me borrow this Charger Six Pack Scat Pack so long as I kept the shiny side up, returned it clean with a full tank of premium fuel, and reviewed it.]

The Basics

Engine: Three-liter twin-cam 24-valve twin-turbocharged water-to-air intercooled inline-six.

Transmission: Eight-speed conventional torque converter automatic.

Drive: Full-time all-wheel-drive with selectable rear-wheel-drive, limited-slip rear differential.

Output: 550 horsepower at 6,200 RPM, 531 lb.-ft. at 3,500 RPM.

Fuel Economy: 16 MPG city, 23 MPG highway, 19 MPG combined (14.5 L/100km city, 10 L/100km highway, 12.5 L/100km combined).

Curb Weight: 4,816 pounds (2,185 kg).

Base Price: $57,685 including freight ($72,390 in Canada).

Price As-Tested: $67,965 ($86,665 in Canada).

Why Does It Exist?

For the past 20 years, the Charger nameplate has been a cornerstone of the Dodge lineup. Initially revived for the 21st-century in four-door form, it spawned a range of brawny V8 variants, including the inimitable Hellcat, becoming an icon in its own right. However, that doesn’t quite explain why this new Charger exists. It’s a replacement for the old model, and it initially launched as an EV as a measure to meet emissions standards. Not only did that go poorly, but rollbacks of federal measures to support EVs mean that this version here is Dodge’s great hope: the Charger Sixpack, featuring the twin-turbocharged straight-six from a Ram 1500.

How Does It Look?

Revamping a beloved car is tricky because it’s always possible to get the styling wrong. However, if you have a wealth of heritage to pull from, there’s nothing wrong with dialling in a little old-school cool. When designing the new Charger, Dodge dipped its cup into its cauldron of history and pulled out surfacing from the ’60s. That plunging crease down the flank, those wide haunches, and that single-frame headlight surround are pure muscle car in the best way possible. However, while the surfacing is great, the proportions lead this full-sizer into the uncanny valley.

The base of the windscreen on the new Charger sits at the same height as in several subcompact crossovers, there’s an enormous amount of metal down each flank, there’s enough wheel gap to house families of opossums, and even the standard 20-inch wheels look a tad undersized. Add in the cheap-looking and thankfully optional light bar, and the new Charger just doesn’t look as handsome as it probably should. Strange, that.

What About The Interior?

Slide inside the new Charger and you’ll be greeted by a surprisingly nice interior. Loads of stitched surfaces, lovely materials, solid build quality … it’s a world apart from the more price-conscious cockpit of the old Charger. As pleasing as some of the sculptural elements are, however, many of the things you interact with on a regular basis are rather strange. The steering wheel’s genuinely uncomfortable as the cross-section of the rim comes to a point where palms naturally rest, the shifter isn’t the most ergonomically astute design, and real buttons are rather scarce. Sure, the seats themselves are quite comfortable, but there’s a more fundamental issue with the Charger that mitigates those supportive cushions: something’s gone terribly wrong with laying out the seating position.

It starts with a floor that’s simply too high because the platform also has to accept a battery pack. Despite sitting tall compared to many traditional large sedans, even with the seat dropped to its lowest height, it feels like your knees are near your ears. It’s tolerable with the squab Carolina-squatted by tilting the leading edge up all the way, but I’m only 5’10” with a 30-ish-inch inseam. The longer-legged will find getting comfortable challenging, especially if they’re not long of arm. Despite the presence of a moderately long dash-to-axle ratio and a telescoping steering column, the wheel never comes as close as most would like. For something that’s supposed to be a blue-collar grand tourer, the basic ergonomics of the Charger feel like a huge miss. The floor’s also high in the rear seat, and once you factor in how the trunk’s shaped like a Toblerone laid on its side, it’s genuinely astonishing that Stellantis has eked such poor space efficiency out of a vehicle with a larger footprint than a Toyota Sienna.

How Does It Drive?

Thankfully, the firepower under the hood of the new Charger Sixpack Scat Pack is almost enough to make you forget about the platform’s packaging. It’s a twin-turbocharged three-liter straight-six making 550 horsepower. That’s more than a BMW M3 CS despite a lower redline, and it comes attached to a rather sensational drivetrain. The ZF 8HP is still considered the gold standard of automatic transmissions, and the Torqueflite 880RE is a licence-built version of that very family of transmissions. Downstream of that, you get full-time all-wheel-drive and a limited-slip rear differential, which work as a team to give the Charger Sixpack Scat Pack a trait no gas-burning high-output Charger’s enjoyed before: This thing can actually put its power down.

Dial up launch control, let the revs build to 3,000, release the brake, and this thing rips to 60 MPH in well under four seconds with nary a hint of wheelspin. However, that doesn’t paint the most accurate picture of the engine’s character. There’s solid mid-range torque for remarkably drama-free overtaking and shove up top when you push the skinny pedal to the carpet, all accompanied by a wonderfully real straight-six buzzsaw soundtrack that settles down nicely on the freeway. Sure, the 3,500 RPM torque peak means you get some turbo lag down low, but that just means the Charger doesn’t run out of breath up top, and you can easily drive it out of boost to get reasonably acceptable fuel economy.

The long-legged overdrive ratios pair nicely with the Charger Sixpack Scat Pack’s suspension, which comes into its own at higher speeds. There’s a slight softness here that irons out expansion joints and freeway potholes fairly well, making Dodge’s only current passenger car a faithful continent-crusher. Well, faithful on big, divided highways. Present it with a corner, and you’ll find a limitation. It’s not so much the standard Goodyear Eagle Sport all-season tires that hold this coupe back when the mood for fun arises, but instead sheer weight. Even after ditching the Daytona’s battery pack, this thing weighs in at 4,816 pounds before options. As such, the hard-wearing tires only accentuate the platform’s drawbacks. Steady-state understeer arrives so severely that it’s tricky to dial back with a slight lift of the throttle, hard acceleration from a roll feels curiously inert, and the massive heft combines with a spongy brake pedal to make stopping feel a little bit sketchy.

However, there is a way to dial up the fun here: If you select sport mode while perfectly stopped, a virtual tile will appear for a proper rear-wheel-drive mode. Tap that, and the Charger Sixpack Scat Pack indulges in all your worst impulses, eagerly engaging in outrageous powersliding tomfoolery. The steering may be numb, but its accuracy makes winding on the right amount of opposite lock easy. The 121-inch wheelbase gives you loads of time to correct twinges of the rear axle, and those high-treadwear tires serve up progressive breakaway. Despite all the compromises made by people in suits, the calibration engineers have worked hard to make this a proper Charger.

Does It Have The Electronic Crap I Want?

If you spec it up, absolutely. My test car came with two big screens, wireless Apple CarPlay and Android Auto, a surround-view camera system, adaptive cruise control, heated and ventilated front seats, heated rear seats, a heated steering wheel, wireless phone charging, a power hatch, and a HUD. However, just because the Charger Sixpack Scat Pack can be optioned with the stuff you want doesn’t make all of it excellent. The haptics on either side of the screen don’t respond with feedback; the 18-speaker Alpine sound system isn’t particularly crisp; the electronic door latches sometimes have latency; and then there’s the layout of the gauge cluster.

The presence of a digital gauge cluster on the new Charger sounds fairly standard for the industry on paper, but it feels like nobody on the UX team has ever driven a performance car before. Even in the Charger’s most performance-oriented drive mode, its digital cluster hides parts of the tachometer and speedometer until the virtual needles spin close to them. This isn’t a huge problem when it comes to the speedometer because there’s a nice big digital readout, but not having the entire tachometer visible in paddle-shift mode is annoying because you will miss a shift and hit the limiter.

Three Things To Know About The 2026 Dodge Charger Six Pack Scat Pack

1. Rear-wheel-drive mode serves up all the dumb fun you could possibly want.
2. It weighs 455 pounds more than the old V8-powered Charger Scat Pack, and you can feel it.
3. It’s weirdly cramped inside for such an enormous car.

Does The Dodge Charger Sixpack Scat Pack Fulfil Its Purpose?

Sort of. If you can get comfortable in the driver’s seat, it’s a wonderful long-distance freeway cruiser with plenty of power, a reasonably compliant ride, and it’ll let you do all the antisocial stuff you’d buy a Dodge Charger for in the first place. However, the Charger Sixpack Scat Pack is also so incredibly compromised. From the high floor to the hefty curb weight to the mildly infuriating tech interface to the weirdly uncomfortable steering wheel, you’ll have to live with some serious downsides if you want a straight-six Charger in your driveway.

Then there’s the matter of price. In America, it starts at $57,985, but my test car came with roughly $10,000 in options. The Plus group is the big one, adding an enormous list of equipment including ventilated seats, wireless phone charging, a power hatch, a 360-degree camera system, and a whole bunch of nice interior plastics. The carbon trim and suede highback seats run an extra $2,095, the glass roof an additional $1,395, the Alpine sound system an extra $1,395, and the Bludicrous paint an extra $695. It’s hard to recommend this experience optioned up to nearly $68,000, but closer to the $57,985 base price, there’s an argument to be made here for a big family-friendly hatchback that isn’t a crossover.

In Canada, where the Charger is built, things are different. The Sixpack Scat Pack starts at $72,390, and simply ticking the Plus group box makes the Charger Sixpack Scat Pack more expensive than a BMW M340i, which is a better car in almost every regard. You lose the hatch and some rear seat legroom by going German in this instance, but you gain a vastly more comfortable driving position, better fuel economy, better handling, a more legible gauge cluster, normal door handles, and more confident braking, all while maintaining the same off-the-mark punch and gaining an inch of rear headroom.

Really, the biggest problem with the Charger Sixpack Scat Pack is design. If it had a meaningfully lower floor than the electric model and a lower false floor in the trunk, it would be markedly more practical and thus far easier to justify. Likewise, if the steering wheel’s rim were made out of round stock and the steering column extended closer to the driver, it would be more comfortable. I don’t envy the jobs of the engineers who made this thing fun to throw around because that must’ve been a herculean task. Unfortunately, a bit of slidey turbocharged fun can’t quite make up for the Charger’s daily limitations at this sort of asking price.

What’s The Punctum Of The Dodge Charger Sixpack Scat Pack?

A reasonably strong powertrain only goes so far.

Top graphic image: Thomas Hundal