Dodge Dropped the Hemi V8 From the 2026 Charger — MotorWeek Still Named It Best Car of the Year

Dodge’s new Charger ditched the V8 completely for a twin-turbo six that most fans expected to disappoint. A full day of track testing proved otherwise, with brakes that never faded and a 0-60 time nobody predicted.

Dodge spent six decades building the Charger’s reputation on a V8 rumble, then for 2026 it walked away from that entirely. No Hemi. No V8 of any kind. In its place sits a twin-turbo six-cylinder pulled from the same Stellantis engine family that powers minivans and pickups, and plenty of longtime fans braced for a downgrade. Instead, MotorWeek strapped sensors to a Charger SIXPACK, took it to Roebling Road Raceway, and came back naming it their 2026 “Best of the Year.” The car that was supposed to mark the end of the Charger as muscle fans knew it just turned in a 3.9-second 0-60 and brakes that showed zero fade after a full day of hot laps.

The Review That Put the V8-Less Charger on Trial

MotorWeek’s road test crew put the Charger SIXPACK Scat Pack through its paces on a cold February day, with track temperatures in the upper 40s Fahrenheit and a surface not prepped for drag-strip grip. Even so, with Launch Control dialed to 3,200 RPM and the optional square set of 305-section tires biting down in all-wheel-drive mode, the car ripped through its first two gears and posted a 0-60 time of 3.9 seconds and a quarter-mile pass of 12.2 seconds at 116 mph — numbers the crew called consistent across multiple runs and in line with Dodge’s own official figures.

The bigger surprise came under braking. Brembo six-piston front calipers clamp onto 380-millimeter rotors, and despite the SIXPACK’s roughly 4,800-pound curb weight, the brakes showed no sign of fade through an entire day of track sessions. MotorWeek’s testers did note some mid-corner body roll and steering that felt light, but praised how easily the car found its apexes and how its low-end torque — 88% of peak arriving at just 2,500 RPM — made for quick exits out of corners, with the twin Garrett turbochargers spooling toward a peak of 30 psi of boost. The testers spent most of their hot laps with the car switched into rear-wheel-drive mode, which they said unlocked the throttle-induced oversteer Dodge clearly engineered the car to deliver on a track day, even though the standard all-wheel-drive setup is what makes that 3.9-second launch possible in the first place.

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Why Dodge Killed the Charger’s V8 in the First Place

2026 marks the Charger’s 60th anniversary, and the car’s history with MotorWeek goes back nearly as far as the show itself — which is celebrating its own 45th season on the air. The crew’s retrospective pointed back to the 1983 Charger 2.2, a hood-scooped, front-wheel-drive economy car built for the post-fuel-crisis era, a reminder that “Charger” hasn’t always meant big-block muscle. The modern story took its sharpest turn in 2024, when Dodge introduced the Charger Daytona as what it called the world’s first electric muscle car — no engine at all, just electric motors driving all four wheels. The SIXPACK is the next chapter in that story: an internal-combustion eighth-generation Charger built to prove gasoline still has a place in the lineup even after the V8 is gone for good.

That engine is the Hurricane, a 3.0-liter twin-turbo inline-six that Stellantis also uses across other models in its lineup, a long way from the dedicated muscle-car V8s the Charger name used to carry. In the Scat Pack’s high-output tune, it makes 550 horsepower and roughly 531 lb-ft of torque — not quite Hellcat Redeye territory, but enough to earn MotorWeek’s nod as a genuine muscle-car engine rather than a placeholder. A standard-output version of the same Hurricane six, making 420 horsepower and 468 lb-ft, powers the upcoming R/T trim, giving Dodge a two-tier lineup of gas-powered Chargers to sit alongside the electric Daytona.

Visually, the SIXPACK trades the Daytona EV’s distinctive “R-Wing” front air passage for a flatter, more conventional fascia and a larger grille to feed the twin turbos, while keeping the same roughly 80-inch width and 207-inch length that make the current Charger feel road-dominating in person. A four-door sedan version is due to follow the two-door coupe MotorWeek tested, so buyers who want the new drivetrain without the two-door body won’t have to wait long.

What $56,990 Actually Buys in a Post-Hemi Charger

Inside, the SIXPACK pairs a 12.3-inch infotainment touchscreen with a 10.25-inch digital gauge cluster, a mix of haptic and analog switchgear, and a pistol-grip shifter that carries over the Charger’s familiar character from prior generations. MotorWeek’s testers found the rear seats surprisingly roomy at 37 inches of legroom — enough to comfortably seat four adults for a drive to dinner — even if the front seat bolstering wasn’t built for serious lateral grip on track. An eight-speed TorqueFlite automatic handles shifts; the testers weren’t impressed by the spryness of its downshifts, but liked how eager the inline-six was to rev out, rewarding every upshift with a bark from the car’s active exhaust.

On pricing, the Charger SIXPACK Scat Pack starts at $56,990, though MotorWeek’s optioned test car stickered at $68,755 once every available extra was added. The R/T trim, built on the same Hurricane platform at the lower output tune, starts at $51,990, while the all-electric Daytona starts at $61,990. A four-door body adds roughly $2,000 across the lineup, and all versions — gas and electric alike — share the same STLA-Large platform. That shared architecture is the real engineering story here: it lets Dodge keep building both battery-electric and gasoline Chargers side by side on the same assembly line in Ontario, Canada, for as long as buyers keep choosing either one.

The V8 Question Nobody at Dodge Will Fully Answer

MotorWeek’s own closing take left the door open rather than shut: the Charger SIXPACK is “a chaotic car for a chaotic time,” built to deliver both electric and internal-combustion thrills from the same platform, and the crew flatly said they’d bet the Hemi V8 eventually makes some kind of comeback, even if nothing has been confirmed. For now, the six-cylinder is the only gasoline option, and based on lap times and brake performance that held up without complaint, it’s doing a convincing job of filling a V8-sized hole. Viewers reacting to the test online seemed most stunned by the two numbers that don’t usually get attention in a muscle-car review — that 4,800-pound curb weight, and the nearly 30 psi of boost Dodge is comfortable running from the factory on a production engine.

Watch the full video above and let us know your thoughts in the comments.

A 45-Year-Old Show Still Setting the Bar for Honest Reviews

Part of why this particular test carries weight with longtime fans is who delivered it. MotorWeek has been producing the same frank, no-nonsense road tests on PBS stations since 1981, and its hosts have built a reputation for calling out flaws as readily as praising a strong lap time. Viewers reacting to this test weren’t shy about doing the same — several flagged what they saw as inconsistent panel gaps and hood alignment on the test car, the kind of quality-control nitpick that didn’t stop the SIXPACK from still landing MotorWeek’s own “Best of the Year” nod on the strength of its numbers. That combination — genuine enthusiasm for the drivetrain alongside a fan base still picking apart build quality — is part of why the award means something: it wasn’t a rubber stamp, it was praise that survived real scrutiny from people who clearly weren’t inclined to hand it out easily.

That credibility matters even more given how skeptical much of the Charger’s fan base was going into this generation. The Daytona’s electric-only debut in 2024 left a lot of V8 loyalists assuming Dodge was abandoning performance altogether in favor of a quieter, more efficient future. The SIXPACK doesn’t undo that shift — the Hemi genuinely isn’t coming back for this generation, at least not yet — but it answers the loudest complaint directly: that a muscle car without a V8 can’t actually behave like one at the limit. A sub-4-second 0-60, a 12-second quarter-mile, and brake rotors that didn’t fade after a full day on track is about as direct an answer as a car company can give.