Many of the pictures Dodge published to promote the now-departed Challenger showed the big coupe surrounded by the smoke of its own rear tires. Its replacement, the Charger, is available with electric and piston power, but the EV mysteriously lacks the ability to rip a big ol’ burnout.
The burnout, an ode to V8 mayhem and rear-wheel-drive mischief, is inextricably linked to the muscle car. So when Dodge announced “the world’s first and only electric muscle car,” enthusiasts assumed it would be capable of roasting its rear tires. All-wheel drive isn’t a deal-breaker: Dodge assigned a motor to each axle, and dialing in the ability to do a burnout would theoretically require locking the front wheels with a line lock to let the rear wheels spin freely in a glorious cloud of smoke. There’s no line lock, however, and the EV can’t do a burnout.
Our colleagues at MotorTrend tried to do a burnout in the new Charger and failed.
“In fact, the Charger Daytona won’t do a burnout. No matter what we tried, the electric Charger stubbornly rejected our efforts to announce its arrival to the world via smoke signals. It’s probably capable of doing one with a line lock feature, but inexplicably that’s the one toy Dodge failed to program in,” the publication wrote after putting the 670-horsepower EV through its paces.
Are there plans in Dodge’s pipeline to sooner or later add a line lock to the Charger? If so, would it require hardware changes, or would engineers be able to beam a line lock via an over-the-air software update? Both questions remain unanswered. Inside EVs reached out to Dodge for more details and didn’t learn much. Is the Charger currently available with a line lock? Nope. Will it ever be? Who knows; Dodge didn’t comment.
That’s not to say the new Charger can’t roast its tires. Some trims get Drift and Donut driving profiles that—you guessed it—allow the driver to drift and do donuts by making the stability control system more permissive and shifting the torque distribution toward the rear wheels. And yet, not including a line lock for burnouts feels like a major oversight from a company that boldly claims it’s bringing the muscle car into the EV era.
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