Dodge’s “Six Pack” Never Had Six Cylinders in 1969 — The 2026 Charger Scat Pack Finally Made the Name Literal

Dodge’s new 550-horsepower Charger Scat Pack borrows a nameplate that goes back to 1969 — but the original “Six Pack” didn’t have six cylinders at all, it had six carburetor barrels bolted to a 440 V8. A week of real-world commuting captured with binaural microphones shows what the twin-turbo namesake actually delivers: a 3.7-second 0-60 time and a driving experience nobody expects from a car named after a decades-old carburetor joke.

Dodge just resurrected one of its most famous badges, and almost nobody driving past a new Charger on the highway realizes the name is a joke on its own history. In 1969, “Six Pack” had nothing to do with cylinder count — it meant six carburetor barrels bolted to a 440-cubic-inch V8. Fifty-seven years later, the 2026 Charger Scat Pack drops a genuine six-cylinder engine under the hood and calls it Sixpack anyway, and the twin-turbo motor hiding behind that vintage name is quietly one of the quickest factory Mopars ever built. YouTuber Tedward spent time commuting in one on Vermont’s back roads with binaural microphones running, and what he found wasn’t a nostalgia act — it was a car that catches drivers off guard who don’t know what they’re looking at. The old Six Pack cars used to sandbag unsuspecting rivals at stoplights too, just with a very different kind of engine doing the work.

Living With the New Six Pack, Not Just Testing It

In “2026 Dodge Charger Scat Pack – Commuting In The 550HP Muscle Car,” Tedward runs the new two-door Scat Pack through actual daily-driver duty rather than a closed-track blast — highway stretches through Vermont, the kind of driving that actually reveals whether a car is livable. His binaural rig, the same in-cabin recording setup he uses for his “Respect the Drive” podcast, captures the turbo six’s induction noise and turbo spool the way a driver’s ears actually hear it, not the way a microphone bolted near the exhaust tip hears it. That distinction matters with this engine, because the Hurricane inline-six doesn’t sound anything like the Hemi V8s Charger owners are used to, and Tedward treats that head-on instead of pretending the car is something it isn’t.

The review lands on a few unglamorous but telling details: a flat-bottom steering wheel that trades a little comfort for a sportier look, physical climate and seat-heat buttons that Tedward argues beat digging through a touchscreen menu on a rough road, and a genuinely useful trunk — enough space, by his estimate, to lay a full sheet of drywall flat. He also calls out a wind-noise difference between the two-door Scat Pack and the four-door R/T he’d driven previously, the kind of observation that only shows up after actually living with a car rather than test-driving it for an afternoon.

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The Original Six Pack Never Had Six Cylinders

The name Dodge borrowed is a genuine piece of muscle car history, and it’s a stranger story than most people assume. In the middle of the 1969 model year, Chrysler started offering a factory setup of three two-barrel Holley carburetors — a 350-cfm unit in the center flanked by two vacuum-operated 500-cfm carbs — on the 440-cubic-inch Magnum V8 in the Dodge Super Bee and Plymouth Road Runner. Dodge called it the Six Pack; Plymouth, for reasons of branding rather than engineering, called the identical setup the Six Barrel. Either way, “six” referred to the carburetor barrels, not the cylinder count — the engine underneath was still a big-block V8. Rated at 390 horsepower and 490 lb-ft, dyno testing at the time showed the real number was closer to 420 horsepower, and at just $119 over the base engine, it undercut the 426 Hemi’s $700 price tag so badly that the Road Runner version reportedly outsold the Hemi by roughly two to one. For a deeper look at how Dodge’s full-size muscle car evolved in the years right after those original Six Pack cars, our breakdown of the criminally underrated 1971 Charger redesign picks up the story from there.

The badge disappeared from Dodge’s lineup for decades before Stellantis dusted it off for an entirely different purpose. The last Hemi-powered Charger rolled off the line in December 2023, replaced first by the all-electric Charger Daytona — a car that drew heavy backlash from longtime Mopar buyers and reportedly got outsold by the discontinued gas models it was supposed to replace. Dodge’s answer was the gas-powered Sixpack lineup: a genuine twin-turbocharged 3.0-liter inline-six built to give V8 loyalists a reason to stay. This time, “Six” is literal — it really is a six-cylinder — and “Pack” describes the twin Garrett-sourced turbochargers packed onto the engine rather than a trio of carburetors sitting on top of one. It’s a deliberate bit of brand mythology: Dodge is betting that Six Pack still means something to buyers who’ve never seen a 440 in person, and using the name as a signal that the new engine, however different mechanically, is still meant to carry the same troublemaker reputation.

550 Horsepower From an Engine Nobody Expected

On paper, the new Six Pack more than earns the connection. The Charger Scat Pack’s Hurricane inline-six is rated at 550 horsepower and 531 lb-ft of torque, and Dodge quotes a 3.9-second run to 60 mph with a 12.2-second quarter mile; independent testing has come in even quicker, with a 3.7-second 0-60 and a 12.1-second quarter mile at 116 mph. That’s Hellcat-adjacent territory from an engine with two fewer cylinders, starting at a price around $54,995 — cheap enough, relative to the outgoing supercharged V8 cars, that one commenter under Tedward’s video joked the only real strike against it is that it’s still “brutally expensive” next to a bare-bones base model. The Sixpack engine now anchors the whole gas-powered side of the lineup, sitting well above the standard-output R/T (420 horsepower from the same basic twin-turbo six) and giving Dodge a genuine answer to the “where’s my V8” complaints that followed the Daytona EV’s launch.

Multiple viewers echoed the same reaction Tedward has in the video itself: they didn’t believe the turbo six could pull like this until they were the ones behind the wheel, watching the speedometer climb faster than the engine note suggested it should. It’s worth noting the new Charger’s theatrical Fratzonic exhaust — the speaker-driven system that pipes a synthesized engine note through the body — belongs to the all-electric Charger Daytona, not the gas-powered Scat Pack in this video; the sound Tedward’s binaural mics are actually capturing here is the twin-turbo six doing the work on its own, no amplifier involved.

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