Ever since Dodge unveiled the electric successor for the Charger and Challenger sedan and coupe, it’s seen a less-than-rosy reception. No problem, there’s one reliable old trick manufacturers can pull from their sleeves to grease the sales wheels: incentives. Dodge is currently advertising a special on the Charger Daytona, a lease payment of $325 per month for 24 months. If you dig the idea of a large electric liftback coupe, that might sound like an attractive proposition. The problem is, you’re gonna want to read the fine print and do a little math.
Granted, the catch isn’t the trim level, because this offer applies to the high-output Charger Daytona Scat Pack rather than the regular R/T model. That means you get a 670-horsepower full-sized coupe with dual-motor all-wheel-drive and properly quick straight-line performance. Sure, it might not be able to do a burnout, but zero-to-60 mph in a claimed 3.3 seconds puts this thing on the level with two-wheel-drive Lamborghini Huracans and Ferrari 458 Italias.
Sure, the Charger Daytona might have other flaws, like some weirdly cheap interior bits, an aggravatingly slow power seat mechanism to get into the rear seats, reports of disappointing real-world range, and a cargo area that gets weirdly shallow towards the back, potentially leading to crushed groceries, but none of those are catches here either. I’m talking about the actual terms of the deal.
The first questionable part is that Dodge requires a strong $3,604 downpayment on the lease. Add in the lease disposal fee of $395, and that balloons the effective payment to $491.63. What’s more, although putting money down on a lease gets a customer to a desired monthly payment, it comes with a certain amount of risk. Let’s say the car you lease gets totalled soon after leaving the lot. Your insurance company should pay off the remainder of the lease, but that downpayment you spent is gone.
Oh, and this is a conquest offer, so you have to show proof that you already own or lease a non-Dodge vehicle, but that shouldn’t be a problem for many customers. The traditional Charger and Challenger crowd has loudly voiced their collective opinion on the Charger Daytona, and I don’t think we’re going to see as much overlap as Dodge might’ve hoped for.
While an effective payment of $491.63 is pretty far from the headline figure of $325 per month, it’s not a terrible payment for a 670-horsepower car that’ll run from zero-to-60 mph in the threes, right? Well, not quite. See, this 24-month lease deal comes with the insane stipulation of a ridiculous mileage cap — you can only drive one of these Chargers 5,000 miles per year without incurring any overage charges. Oh, and with overage charges standing at 30 cents per mile, not minding the mileage is going to cost people big time.
Keep in mind, 5,000 miles per year for two years is 416.6 miles per month, or just 13.69 miles per day. Even with a second vehicle in the household for road trips, 13.69 miles per day isn’t going to cover many commutes, but at the same time, we aren’t exactly looking at a weekend car here. This isn’t a Mazda MX-5, a gloriously impractical roadster best enjoyed when the sun is shining and the traffic’s clear. It’s a big electric five-seat liftback coupe meant to be used as a daily driver.
Considering the average American drives around 13,000 miles per year, this lease special on the Dodge Charger Daytona is objectively a bad deal. Remember, always read the fine print before you get hooked in on a lease deal, because the actual terms of the contract could prove costly indeed.
Top graphic image: Dodge
Support our mission of championing car culture by becoming an Official Autopian Member.
-
The Electric Dodge Charger Daytona Reportedly Can’t Do A Standing Burnout And That Feels Like A Massive Oversight
-
I Drove The Electric Dodge Charger Daytona, Get Ready To Get Mad
-
Dodge’s New Ad Campaign: ‘Save The Planet From Lame, Soulless, Weak-Looking, Self-Driving Sleep Pods Everyone Keeps Polluting Our Streets With
-
Cutting The Roof Off A Dodge Charger Daytona Won’t Make Up For The Missing V8, But It’s Still Cool
-
The New Dodge Charger Reportedly Coulda Had A Hemi V8
Please send tips about cool car things to tips@theautopian.com. You could even win a prize!
sounds like the perfect car for the little ol’ lady from Pasadena
“Brotherhood of Muscle” – what say you?
they were advertising them for just over 400 a month around here. seems like a great way to get into one and do some testing without getting stuck with it in 2 years should the EV boat sink. But yeah miles allowed and price to get in was where they did the switch part of the Bait and Switch. to be fair the stealerships are also playing dumb games with new 2024 stuff as well. plop the online add up in front of their face and they still try to say the deal is 1-2 K more than what they falsely are advertising.
This lease is designed for someone like me. My daily commute varies between 1.3 and 1.5 miles depending on the route I take. Everything I need like grocery/gas/target and lots of great food spots, including breweries, are with two miles of my home. I’m single, no kids, so if I have no plans I tend to just hangout at home gaming with buddies online. I currently drive less than 6000 miles per year, and that’s with a handful of small road trips thrown in. But with a car like this I’d likely find more excuses to drive more so I’d likely go past the 5k mark haha.
What you need, sir or madam, is a used Miata. (Or a 240, I guess). No need to spend $11,800 over 2 years for that little amount of use. That’s what this lease would cost over 2 years.
The answer to every car question!
Oh trust me, I’d kill for another 240 over this haha.
I am full time WFH, have been for nearly 15 years. I only drive to the local market, etc most days, less than 5 miles and have the occasional weekend road trip. I still average 8-9k miles a year.
My daily is a 1998 BMW e36 with 120,000 miles. So technically this car drove less than 5,000 miler per year.
Of course I’m messing that up since my commute is 25 miles, but oh well.
This is a man throwing shade better than a giant fucking beach umbrella, btw…
I work from home, and we generally take my wife’s car for road trips. As such, when I took in my ‘23 A6 Allroad to the dealer for its 12 month service, he laughed at me (kindly, mind you), because it had 6000 miles on it.
I do kids to-and-from school, and use it for weekend up-and-back ski trips in the winter to a mountain 25 miles away, and I hit 6k. How the hell someone could drive less than 5K is beyond me.
If I calculated it correctly, my Volvo, which has, over the past 13 years, accumulated a mileage of 420’000, covered 621 per week, just shy of 89 per day… and it’s not my main car.
Can’t imagine being limited to 13. At $0.30 per extra unit, I’d have paid $123’000 for excess mileage.
Please feel free to double check those numbers ^^
Well you pay about $12k over the lease term. For 13,000 miles. Meaning about 92 cents per mile. The overage rate isn’t bad thus at 30 cents a mile.
I don’t see it in the fine print here but usually these “deals” are restricted to a specific lower trim that the dealer doesn’t even carry. By the time your build order is in, the incentive is over. It’s aimed at people who expressly DO NOT read fine print (aka suckers).
You haven’t met many Dodge drivers, have you?
I guess removing everything but muscle cars from the lineup really brought the IQ curve down. Man, I miss the 90’s.
I can’t stay under 5,000 miles and I’m a retiree.
That’s not even enough mileage for back-and-forth to takeovers.
Crackpipe.
And I say this as one who assesses the quoted concerns as those of spoiled housewives living in upper-middle-class comfort in the suburbs. All of that doesn’t matter, relative to whether the car actually works, and will it still work 3 decades later?
This car is big, heavy, overly tech-saturated, unrepairable without proprietary stealership-only software tools, and not built to the reliability standards of even Tesla(which I wouldn’t buy, and I’m saying this recognizing the Tesla Model 3 next to the Mazda Miata as one of the most likely new cars I’d even remotely consider buying today, neither of which are convincing enough).
Tech bloat is what is killing electric cars. The drive system and battery technology, on a basic, functional level, was ready in the 1990s. The EVs designed today for the US market, were deliberately meant to end up in a landfill long before the most significant components were no longer usable, except for those components being deliberately locked out of a second life via encrypted proprietary software that only an incompetent stealership could have any hope of working with.
This Charger exemplifies everything wrong with the modern EV. I’d rather have a previous-gen ICE-driven Hellcat or Demon, and I say this as someone who absolutely LOATHES using fossil fuels. And I’d rather have an old-school 60s/early-70s era Charger than a Hellcat or Demon. At least I could work on the old-school myself, with basic tools, which is something EVs can and absolutely should be. They’d last forever that way, but the auto industry doesn’t like that idea because we won’t be constantly forking over our hard-earned money to them. Go-figure.
Time to let the Chinese in, and good riddance.
I suspect the Chinese EVs are equally software locked to their respective motherships.
And at least half of their manufacturers are unlikely to still be around 10 years from now, given how ridiculously fragmented over-saturated their market is, with so may small and midsize players
And the ones who remain will be partially state owned, which is not encouraging with respect to customer service to say the least
State owned I’m not sure, but surely subsidized by the government, which is something that Western governments would never do, of course /s
You’re probably right about most of them, but at least they’re cheap.
I’m no Chicken Little about large car batteries, but, given the ‘good enough’ attitude in Chinese manufacturing, and the culture of a chain of subcontractors before you get to the level where an actual product is made, I am not that excited by the prospect of buying a Chinese-made electric car no matter how cheap.
-typing this on an iPhone: I know products can be produced to high quality levels in the PRC—I’m just wary of the lack of transparency and sometimes quality control
That’s $1.18 per mile. $0.30 per mile of overage actually brings down the cost per mile of the lease.
There is a small sliver of the courier/hot shot delivery segment that do frequent 3-4 hour runs that allows for 2 door vehicles with limited cargo space on their leases. Also that have locations with quick chargers for the pick/drops.
Dodge now has this market cornered.
And I thought that the “brown manual diesel station wagon” market was small…