Dodge Resurrected a Name Buried Since 1971 — The New Sixpack Charger Packs 160 More Horsepower Than the Original

Dodge just brought back a name Chrysler shelved in 1971 — and gave it 160 more horsepower than the original. The new 2026 Charger Sixpack Scat Pack swaps three carburetors for twin turbos on a 3.0-liter six, and the numbers tell a genuinely wild story.

Dodge buried the name once. In 1971, after two model years of stuffing three two-barrel carburetors onto a 440 cubic-inch big block and calling it the Six Pack, Chrysler let the option quietly disappear—a casualty of insurance surcharges, emissions rules, and a muscle car market that was running out of road. For over fifty years, “Six Pack” stayed a nostalgia term, the kind of phrase that got a knowing nod at a car show and nothing more. Then Dodge dug it back up for the 2026 Charger, welded it to a twin-turbocharged inline-six, and handed enthusiasts a number that would have sounded like science fiction in 1969: 550 horsepower. That is 160 more than the original A12-package Super Bees and Road Runners that made the name famous. Car Confections got an early walkaround and review of the new Charger Scat Pack Sixpack, and the car it describes is less a tribute act than a genuine argument that Dodge’s engineers understood exactly what they were reviving.

What the Review Actually Covers

Car Confections structures its review the way a shopper would actually experience the car: a detailed exterior walkaround first, then the cabin, the back seat and cargo room, and only then the part everyone actually clicked for—the powertrain. That ordering matters, because the reviewer’s read on the Charger is that Dodge built something bigger and more useful than the car it replaces before it built something faster. One commenter singled out how comfortably tall adults fit inside, a small detail that matters more than it sounds in a segment that has historically treated interior space as an afterthought.

The pricing and ownership section is where the review earns its keep for anyone actually cross-shopping. Dodge is positioning the Sixpack as the most powerful sedan available for under $60,000, and the reviewer walks through resale expectations and reliability considerations for a genuinely new powertrain architecture with no long-term track record yet. That is a fair caveat: this is not a small revision to the old 6.4-liter Hemi, it is a clean-sheet twin-turbo six, and the review is honest that early adopters are also beta testers.

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The Six Pack the Name Is Chasing

The original Six Pack was not a full model—it was option code A12, a mid-1969 addition to the Dodge Super Bee and Plymouth Road Runner lineup that swapped the standard four-barrel for three Holley two-barrels on an aluminum intake. The result was 390 horsepower and 490 lb-ft of torque from the 440, plus a Dana 60 rear axle, a heavy-duty transmission, and a flat-black lift-off hood scoop that told everyone on the street exactly what they were looking at. Dodge built nearly 2,000 A12 Super Bees in 1969, compared with only 125 that got the more famous 426 Hemi—the Six Pack was the practical big-block choice, not the halo car, which is part of why it developed such a loyal following among people who actually drove their muscle cars instead of trailering them. The option survived through 1971 before big-block muscle cars broadly disappeared under the weight of insurance rates and tightening emissions standards. For a look at how a different Detroit survivor adapted to those same pressures instead of vanishing, our profile of the 1976 Oldsmobile Cutlass is worth a look.

What makes the new Sixpack’s name-borrowing more than marketing is the number Dodge chose to chase. Three carburetors on a naturally aspirated big block topped out around 390 horsepower because that is roughly what 1969 fuel delivery and compression limits allowed. Fifty-seven years later, two low-inertia, high-flow turbochargers on a 3.0-liter Hurricane inline-six spinning up to 30 psi of boost get to 550 horsepower and 531 lb-ft of torque from an engine less than half the displacement of the old 440. It is the same engineering instinct—stack multiple forced-induction paths onto a six-cylinder to punch above its weight class—just separated by half a century of turbocharger and materials technology.

Why the Twin-Turbo Six Actually Works as a Charger Engine

The headline numbers are 550 horsepower, 531 lb-ft of torque, a 0-60 mph run in under four seconds, and a 177 mph top speed—figures that would have embarrassed a Hellcat just a decade ago. Standard all-wheel drive, with the ability to switch to rear-wheel drive, addresses the one complaint that followed the old V8 Charger everywhere: all that torque was only usable a few months a year in half the country. The review itself frames the competitive question directly, cross-shopping the new Charger against the Ford Mustang, Chevy Corvette, and BMW M3. Commenters picked up a similar thread in their own terms—one said the car would sit next to a BMW X3 M in the garage, another compared the feel to a 2019 BMW 440i xDrive Gran Coupe—which says as much about how far this Charger has drifted from its V8 ancestors as any spec sheet number.

Not everyone is sold. At least one commenter pushed back on the absence of a factory sunroof option, and more than one pointed out that a sedan-shaped muscle car will always read differently to buyers who grew up on two-door Chargers. That tension—a genuinely quick, genuinely modern car wearing a name built on carburetors and a flat-black hood scoop—is exactly why the Sixpack name works as well as it does. Dodge is not pretending the new car drives like the old one. It is betting that enough of the attitude survived the swap to matter.

The Verdict on Dodge’s Bet

Fifty-five years after Chrysler shelved the Six Pack option, Dodge handed the name to an engine architecture nobody in 1969 could have imagined and still made the comparison make sense: more horsepower, more torque, and a drivetrain built to actually put it down in the rain or snow. Whether that is a worthy successor to the A12 cars or just a well-marketed inline-six is still an open question with no long-term ownership data to answer it—but the review makes clear that Dodge did not just recycle a nostalgic word for a badge. It built a genuinely quick, genuinely different car and dared enthusiasts to argue the name does not fit.

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