Here’s what you’ll learn when you read this story:
The new Dodge Charger Sixpack brings an internal combustion engine back to a Dodge muscle car.
Engineers added selectable all-wheel drive, making the new Dodge Charger one of the only muscle cars that can switch from rear-wheel drive to all-wheel drive at the push of a button.
The Sixpack engine is set to deliver 550 horsepower.
Popular Mechanics has never been to Motortrend’s Roadkill Nights Powered by Dodge, but what better time to attend than the event’s 10-year anniversary. The event is a no-limits horsepower festival that Dodge hosts every year—showing off its latest and greatest products and hosting sanctioned drag racing on the streets of Metro Detroit. Like many years before, they also deployed their motorsports toy box, which means we saw everything from the all-new Dodge Charger Sixpack to 10,000-horsepower top-fuel dragsters all playing around on Woodward Avenue.
Now that my ears have stopped ringing, let’s debrief on what we experienced.
Dodge Charger Sixpack
The Dodge Charger is about to feature all-wheel drive and an inline-six engine. All-wheel drive might sound sacrilegious for a muscle car, but the Charger’s eight-speed automatic transmission (there’s no manual option) can send 100 percent power to the rear wheels at the push of a button thanks to a multi-disc wet clutch system. We went for a passenger ride in a Charger Sixpack around a drifting course at the event, and this thing isn’t afraid to kick its tail out.
We also had the opportunity to see what the Sixpack could do on the dragstrip. As this was Roadkill Nights, it involved a quick blast about 600 feet up Woodward Avenue, which had been closed down and prepped for the event. Nobody was jotting down times, but it’s clear that the new Charger is considerably faster and easier to drive that the previous model (the older cars would just spin the tires off the line). If we take Dodge’s figures at face value, the new Charger Scat Pack is four-tenths of a second quicker to 60 mph than the previous-generation.
On the street, the Charger can also use rear-wheel-drive mode to save gas. Dodge hasn’t released an MPG figure for its latest muscle car, but we’d wager that it’s a considerable improvement over the outgoing Hemi V8 platform. For context, we’ve driven both powertrains in the much heavier Ram TRX and Ram RHO platforms, where we achieved the advertised 12 and 15 MPG figures. Obviously, fuel economy isn’t top of mind when you’re buying a muscle car, but a twin-turbo engine that’s cranking out over 500 horsepower isn’t going to be a steady sipper.
Orders for the 2026 Sixpack-powered Dodge Charger Scat Pack have already begun, and vehicles are set to hit showrooms in the second half on 2025. The Scat Pack will start at an available MSRP of $54,995, with the baseline R/T spec (available soon) for $49,995.
10,000 Horsepower Funny Car Demo
You might call it a stretch to draw similarities from a dragster to a road car, but you don’t actually have to look too far to find them. In fact, the engines used in the fire-breathing top-fuel and funny car dragsters are all based on Chrysler’s 426 Hemi V8 engine architecture—a design that was developed in the 1960s by Tom Hoover. While the underpinnings of the engine used by many Dodge vehicles remain the same, nearly everything else has been changed to achieve five-digit horsepower figures.
As you can see above, we had the pleasure of witnessing Matt Hagan’s funny car doing a burnout on Woodward Avenue. For context, Hagan and his race car normally find themselves at a quarter-mile drag strip, where they’ll cover that distance in under four seconds, reaching top speeds of over 300 miles per hour. The short demonstration at Roadkill Nights was over in an instant, but it rattled my chest. Those who have been to a proper NHRA weekend know that you really just have to be there to fully understand the experience.
For context, the 10,000 horsepower this thing is said to be able to produce is just a theoretical horsepower figure, as nobody has actually measured how much power these engines crank out. But dead-on accurate or not, I was curious about how that power gets to the ground without shredding the driveline to bits. And the solution: dragsters use a direct-drive system with a series of clutches. Anything else simply wouldn’t be up to the task.
What’s Next?
We’re still waiting to drive the new Sixpack-powered Charger ourselves, but it seems like its going to be a new paradigm for Dodge. There were a non-zero number of enthusiasts that I overheard complaining about the lack of a Hemi under the hood, but there’s so much more to the Sixpack than just emissions and fuel economy. From a packaging standpoint, it’s significantly smaller and lighter than the outgoing V8, making plenty of room for the all-wheel drive system. Not only that, but the new-school engine produces comparable horsepower figures, thanks to turbocharging.
While Dodge revived the legacy “Sixpack” nameplate for its all-new powertrain, it’s providing a whole new playground for engineers to work with.
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