Dodge Killed the Charger R/T’s V8 – Then Named Its Replacement After a Legendary 1969 V8 Anyway

The 2026 Dodge Charger R/T swaps its Hemi V8 for a 420-horsepower twin-turbo six branded SIXPACK, a name Dodge borrowed from a legendary three-carburetor 440 V8 option from 1969. A veteran reviewer tested the ,000 loaded version, and the comment section couldn’t agree on whether it still counts as a muscle car.

For sixty years, the words “Dodge Charger” meant one thing under the hood: a V8, and ideally a Hemi. That ended in 2026. The reborn Charger R/T ships with zero cylinders shaped like a V — instead, a twin-turbocharged inline-six from Dodge’s new Hurricane engine family does the work, and it does it without apology. When veteran reviewer Steve Hammes strapped into a loaded 2026 Charger R/T Plus for his TestDriveNow channel, he expected to spend eleven minutes defending the death of the Hemi to Mopar loyalists. Instead, he came away calling the car “a well crafted homage to the past while improving upon all the details” — and the video’s comments, usually a warzone of V8-or-nothing purists, split almost evenly between longtime Hemi owners defending the swap and holdouts who still haven’t forgiven Dodge for it. So what actually happens when the last V8-only muscle car brand in America lets go of the V8?

Hammes has reviewed new cars professionally for over two decades under the TestDriveNow and Drive Time banners, and his verdict on the R/T Plus test car was blunt about money before anything else: the entry-level four-door Charger R/T starts around $54,000, but the loaded R/T Plus he drove — stacked with the Plus package and options — stickered at $68,000. That number alone lit up the comment section faster than the engine debate did. One viewer pointed out that Dodge’s own R/T pricing undercuts a four-cylinder EcoBoost Mustang by only a few thousand dollars; another did the math on a comparably equipped Charger SIXPACK trim and landed closer to $55,500 without the extras Hammes’ tester carried.

What kept the comment section unusually civil was that Hammes didn’t pretend the V8’s absence doesn’t matter — he simply reported what the car does instead. Viewers thanked him specifically for reviewing “the inline-6 Charger” without treating it as a lesser car by default, a rarer stance than it should be in a comment culture where “no V8, no muscle car” is still the reflexive take. Multiple commenters who’d actually bought the car chimed in with real-world experience: one cross-shopped a Scat Pack Sixpack against a leftover Daytona R/T EV, ended up with the electric version at a $30,000 discount, and reported it “blows the doors off any Hemi car I ever had.” Another called the new Charger “menacing to stand in front of” in person in a way photos didn’t capture — the kind of visceral, in-person reaction Dodge is clearly counting on to carry the car through an engine swap this contentious.

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The End of an Unbroken V8 Bloodline

The R/T badge itself predates the Charger. Dodge first stamped it on the 1967 Coronet R/T — “R/T” stood for Road and Track — where it paired a standard 440 Magnum V8 with an optional 426 Hemi. When the Charger was redesigned for 1968 on the same platform, it inherited the R/T trim and the same engine choices, and for the next fifty-five years, across every generation Dodge built, an R/T Charger meant a V8 under the hood: the 5.7-liter Hemi, the 6.4-liter 392, and eventually the supercharged 6.2-liter Hellcat that pushed the last Charger Redeye to 797 horsepower before Dodge pulled the plug on the LX-platform car in 2023.

The 2024 relaunch broke that streak completely. The seventh-generation Charger arrived first as the Daytona, an EV-only muscle car with synthesized exhaust sound piped through speakers, and no V8 or six-cylinder option at all. The backlash from Mopar loyalists was loud enough that Dodge reversed course within about a year, adding gasoline power back to the lineup for 2025 and 2026 in the form of the SIXPACK twin-turbo inline-six — a walk-back rare enough in Detroit that it became its own story. The R/T and Scat Pack trims Hammes reviewed exist because of that reversal: gas engines built because enough buyers refused to accept an EV-only muscle car.

Dodge wasn’t alone in blowing up the old muscle car formula around the same time. Chevrolet ended Camaro production in January 2024, and Dodge’s own Challenger — the Charger’s two-door stablemate — stopped rolling off the assembly line in Ontario in December 2023, both casualties of emissions rules, cost pressure, and a market that had stopped rewarding V8 nostalgia the way it once did. For a stretch of 2024, the Ford Mustang was the only nameplate left standing that had been built continuously, gas engine and all, since the muscle car era began. The SIXPACK-powered Charger R/T is Dodge’s answer to that gap — not a return to the V8 era, but proof the company still thinks a gas-burning Charger is worth building at all.

The name Dodge chose for that engine is its own bit of muscle car trivia, and it’s a detail worth getting right. “Six Pack” wasn’t originally a six-cylinder reference at all. In 1969, Dodge used the name to describe a trio of two-barrel Holley carburetors bolted to the 440-cubic-inch V8 in the Super Bee, a setup Plymouth badged “Six Barrel” on the Road Runner. That triple-carb 440 made 390 horsepower and 490 pound-feet, delivered performance close to the vastly more expensive 426 Hemi at roughly half the cost, and only about 13,900 cars were built with it between 1969 and 1971. Reviving the name for a twin-turbo six is either a knowing wink to Mopar historians or a bet that nobody would remember the original Six Pack was a V8 — either way, it’s the kind of detail that makes the badge debate feel less like a cash grab and more like Dodge trying to have it both ways.

What the SIXPACK Actually Delivers

Strip away the badge nostalgia and the numbers on the R/T’s Hurricane-based six are genuinely competitive. In Standard Output tune, the 3.0-liter twin-turbo inline-six makes 420 horsepower and 468 pound-feet of torque, routed through an 8-speed automatic to standard all-wheel drive — with an on-demand rear-wheel-drive mode for buyers who want the car to behave like a traditional muscle car instead of a grand tourer. Dodge quotes a 4.6-second 0-60 time and a 12.9-second quarter mile for the R/T, numbers that would have embarrassed a 440 Six Pack car by a wide margin and land within shouting distance of what a 5.7-liter Hemi R/T managed a decade ago. The High Output version of the same engine, reserved for the Scat Pack trim, is tuned to 550 horsepower and 531 pound-feet using larger 54mm turbos, forged internals, and a lower-restriction intake and exhaust — a car Hammes didn’t test here but one that shows Dodge isn’t treating the six-cylinder swap as a permanent step down, just a different starting point. Standard all-wheel drive is arguably a bigger philosophical break with muscle car tradition than the missing cylinders — Chargers spent fifty-some years being rear-drive-only by design, treating wheelspin as part of the character. Dodge’s read, based on the R/T’s on-demand RWD mode, is that most buyers now want traction on tap with tail-out drama optional, not the other way around.

That’s the case Hammes ultimately makes without saying it outright: judged purely as a new car rather than a replacement for a specific memory, the Charger R/T is hard to fault. He praised the redesigned interior’s materials and tech, called the reliability outlook a strength worth naming explicitly for a Stellantis product, and repeatedly circled back to how much more resolved the whole package feels than the outgoing LX-platform car. It’s the kind of review that will frustrate viewers looking for a villain — Hammes isn’t interested in defending the V8’s disappearance or mourning it, just describing, competently and at length, what actually replaced it.

The Price Debate Nobody’s Settling

If the engine argument has mostly played out online, the price argument hasn’t. A base four-door R/T starting in the mid-$50,000s — and a loaded R/T Plus tester at $68,000 — landed hard with commenters who remember, or wish they remembered, when muscle car horsepower came a lot cheaper. One viewer did the exact math: a roughly 420-horsepower V8 Mustang cost around $29,000 not that many years ago, they wrote, a gap that has less to do with this specific car and more to do with what a decade of inflation, added safety and emissions equipment, and shrinking economies of scale have done to the entire segment. Other commenters pushed back with their own build sheets, insisting a well-optioned SIXPACK R/T can be had closer to $55,000 without the Plus package’s extras — the same argument that plays out under nearly every new Charger and Mustang review posted this year — the last two nameplates left standing in a segment that used to have four.

What the comment section actually shows, more than any single verdict, is that the Charger R/T hasn’t settled anything — it’s just changed what buyers argue about. Six months ago the fight was whether a V8-less Charger could even be called a muscle car. Now it’s whether $68,000 is a fair price for one, and whether an inline-six with a borrowed V8 nameplate deserves to wear the Charger badge at all. Both arguments assume the car matters enough to keep having them, which, for a nameplate that Dodge nearly let go all-electric two years ago, might be the most telling verdict of all.

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