The 2023 Dodge Charger and Challenger were not small cars. But the 2025 Charger Daytona that replaces them? It’s even bigger. And we’re not talking about a rounding error here; the 2025 Charger is 206.5 inches long. That’s just a touch under 9 inches longer than the Challenger and more than 8 inches longer than the old Charger. Auto Buyers Guide highlighted the discrepancy with this photo of the two generations of Dodge muscle cars side by side at one of the automaker’s recent events.
You’d be forgiven for assuming that the two-door 2023 Charger was measurably longer than its two-door sibling, but at the time they were killed off, the difference in length between them was only about an inch. The Challenger did have a much shorter wheelbase, and when combined with the more aggressive taper of its rear roof line, that made for a far more compromised rear seat than the Charger’s. On the other hand, the Challenger had a trunk deep and wide enough to swallow a poker table with the legs folded. This time around, though, Dodge’s two- and four-door flagships are equally long and even share the same roof and floor.
The generational increase in size may seem antithetical to the mission of a vehicle intended to usher in an era of more efficient performance, especially when you consider that this extra mass comes with significant downsizing of its ICE powertrains. But this extra length (and width, as the graphic below shows) is there to accommodate the Charger’s electrified Daytona variants.
As Auto Buyers Guide also points out, however, there’s an upside to the 2025 Charger’s bigger footprint: tire clearance. The outgoing Mopars needed their Widebody variants in order to fit tires big enough to manage their considerable mass. This time around, the Charger can accommodate a much wider rear tire in stock form. When the first Hellcats shipped in 2015, they had 275 mm tires in the rear, while the 2025 Charger can fit 325s.
This is thanks to the new Stellantis STLA Large platform, which will also underpin (among other models) the new Jeep Recon; all are expected to pack hefty battery packs (the Charger’s sits at 100.5kWh). With that sort of mission brief, it’s no wonder it’s so big-boned. The only beefier electric platform in the company’s portfolio is STLA Frame, which is exclusively for Ram and Jeep’s body-on-frame trucks and SUVs.
Practical considerations aside, Dodge also appears to be comfortable with the simple fact that the new Charger is big. “Early on, we’ve always owned our scale,” Scott Krugger, head of exterior design for Dodge, told The Drive. “The size, the width, the length, we said ‘don’t be shy about it.’ We wanted to play it up. We knew if we could do the same wheelbase with a two-door and make it work, make the proportions correct, we knew it would be a slam dunk.” Krugger also added that the ’68 Charger in particular was one of the new car’s primary influences, and that model “was really long and stretched out. It didn’t hide its length in any way; it plays it up. So we took that same mentality for the Daytona.”
Dodge is trucking 2025 Chargers to dealerships pretty much as we speak, so we won’t have to wait long to see just what all of this means in terms of real-world performance.
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