The gasoline-burning Dodge Charger is officially back, and to celebrate its arrival, President Trump decided to effectively gut the EPA. It came about two years too late to keep the Hemi in Dodge’s lineup (though we expect that to change), but it nonetheless opens new doors for the 3.0-liter, turbocharged inline six under the hood of the new sedan. So, given everything that is happening from a regulatory standpoint, we asked Dodge CEO Matt McAlear whether we could see the return of Mopar’s Stage kits for the internal-combustion Charger.
“Well, I think you know we’ve been talking about this for a long time and if if you look at the last 6 months and everything that we’ve been working on and you look at history, history has a tendency to repeat itself,” he The Drive.
And if you take a look at history, well, there are plenty of examples of Dodge offering performance upgrades for the Hemi and Hellcat, not to mention countless other performance platforms from its past. Even the Neon SRT-4 benefited from Mopar’s Stage upgrades, and make no mistake, those little things could scoot.
The new Charger is a good bit heavier than the car it replaces—a product of several different factors. The car now has standard all-wheel drive (the previous Charger did not) and its platform was engineered to accommodate the wickedly big battery packs that are being stuffed into the floor of the EV variants. Effectively, this makes the new Charger a widebody by default, and that comes with a discernible weight penalty. The base car now checks in at 4,816 pounds with the 420-horsepower I6.
The standard all-wheel drive all but guarantees that the six-cylinder car will wipe the floor with the old 5.7, but we have little doubt that customers will be eager to extract even more performance from the new turbo-six.
“We’re just getting started with this vehicle. Two-door, four-door, 420, 550, 670 [horsepower],” McAlear said. “We continue to listen. We continue to evolve. We continue to always study how do we take Dodge to the next level? How do we continue to be America’s performance brand?”
How indeed.
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