Why The 2024 Dodge Charger Doesn’t Quite Look Right And How To Fix It

Is there any vehicle more quintessentially American than the muscle car (alright, maybe pickup trucks)? The Italians make fantastic small cars, the Germans have their bank vault bahnstormers, the British are good at the gentlemen’s club on wheels, and the Japanese got famous for taking whatever everybody else was doing and building it better. But there’s something uniquely American about taking a two-door family sedan, dropping in a racing-adjacent V8 motor, and then splashing the whole thing in lurid colors (with better brakes and suspension pieces as optional extras).

The late sixties and early seventies were a golden era for the American performance automobile. The cars were accessible and the sales literature was hallucinogenic. It was a glorious final LSD freakout before rising insurance costs and emission legislation brought about the paranoia-riddled hangover of the Malaise Era. In the early nineties, before my free time became filled with beer and alternative music, I built loads of Revell and Monogram muscle car plastic kits. They captivated me because somehow they epitomized the best and worst of American cars all at once. I liked Ford and GM offerings, but it was Mopar that really did it for me – they just seemed that much cooler than their cross-town rivals. Who else would have the audacity to offer a hot pink as a factory paint option? It remains a crime a new version of FM3 Moulin Rouge hasn’t been offered on the Challenger since its 2009 re-introduction.

That car, along with its four-door platform-mate, the current Charge,r is finally dead after fifteen long years on sale. In a weird kink of history being repeated, emissions legislation and the consequent EV transition are forcing Stellantis to ditch the old stager for a new model to replace both cars, built on a bang-up-to-date platform that can accept both BEV and ICE powertrains. The venerable Hemi V8 has been replaced by the new Hurricane twin snail inline six (for now….). I first wrote about the design of the new Charger when it was revealed in concept form, nearly two years ago.

Although shown in two door form, the uncomfortable and slightly hunched proportions appeared to me to be a four-door car in disguise, and so it has been proved – the new Charger with be available in either form. This is sound from a business point of view: a two-door and a four-door with essentially the same sheet metal, just like how it used to be when we got two-door versions of four-door cars. The SRT Charger Daytona Concept didn’t quite work for me then, and now we have the official production car it still doesn’t quite work for me now. Let’s see if we can figure out what’s wrong and try to fix it.

Why The Challenger Is So Good And The New Charger Less So

One of the reasons I think the 2009 Challenger is so good is because it doesn’t exactly copy the 1970-74 car line for line – something that would be impossible with twenty-first-century hard points. Rather, it hints at the memory of the original while being modern in execution. The new Charger is a lot less subtle in its approach. Because Dodge have built their whole brand around bubblegum nostalgia, moving into the EV era they can’t afford to frighten customers off, so they have to offer something warm and familiar. The trouble with that is, the 1968-70 Charger is one of the absolute masterpieces of late twentieth-century car design. And this remember was a time when Bill Mitchell was churning banger after banger out of the GM tech center. Nonetheless, the second-generation Charger is a copper-bottomed classic, and any attempt to try and copy it so closely is only ever going to come up short. This is one reason I think the new Charger doesn’t quite work: you cannot improve upon perfection.

Pillars And Proportions

Starting off with the straight-on-side view, part of the problem with images like this is the way they are created. They are taken (or rendered) with a long lens, zoomed in from a long way out. This dials out the perspective and flattens the image, providing you with an accurate and undistorted side view. The flat side view is useful during the design process to evaluate your design, but less helpful for showing the car off in a flattering way. This is because the human eyeball never perceives a car like this in real life, so it’s important to keep this in mind.

First of all, I want to look at the glazing and the side pillars. The two-door (I know it’s a hatch but calling it a three-door feels wrong) as shown here doesn’t look too bad. But the four-door, yikes. Because the sheet metal is shared, the cant rail and the roof line on both versions are identical. The two-door gets away with it but on the four-door the B pillar is all wrong. The high point of the roof is the header rail (where the windshield meets the roof) and then dives down towards the rear of the car. The B pillar is too upright which looks awkward and makes the rear side windows look much bigger than the front ones. The B pillar should angle towards an imaginary convergence point with the A and C pillars. Tweaking the B pillar so it leans back solves this imbalance in size between the side windows and looks much more harmonious.

The second main issue I have that affects both the two-door and four-door is the dodgy proportions: the Charger just looks a little dumpy. I convinced myself that part of the problem was the new car was much taller than the Challenger, but a dive into the press kits for both cars told me the Charger only has an extra inch in height. What’s more, the new car is a whopping 8 inches longer, four inches wider, and has a five-inch longer wheelbase (most of which has gone into giving back seaters more room). So what is happening here? The problem I think is the nose is too low and the front overhang is too stubby.

I’m not saying this because the ’68-’70 Charger had overhangs that would blot out the sun as it rounded a turn. It’s all about visual balance. At 206.5” (5247mm) long the new Charger is a big old bus. As the size of a car goes up and the wheelbase increases you need to keep everything in proportion. The extra sheet metal between the wheels needs a little extra visual maas outside of the wheels to balance it out. The fender line taking a step dive as it passes forward of the front wheel arch doesn’t help because it’s making the hood look too short. This effect is exaggerated in the front three-quarter view, making the fender line look too high and truncated. Nudging the front wheels back would take away some critical dash-to-axle ratio, so let’s see if tweaking the nose itself helps.

I’ve pulled the whole front forward a fraction, to give a little more front overhang, and lifted the leading edge of the hood up slightly, to flatten the line of the front fender. Small changes, but I think they make a big difference. The aggressive plunge of the fender line no longer foreshortens as much in the front three-quarter view and helps make the hood look longer, helping to balance out the overall proportions.

Right, let’s put all this into GIFs so you can see the changes I’ve made more easily.

Car design is an art of nuance, and intimately understanding the category of vehicle you are working with. A low nose and short front overhang might be appropriate for a smaller sports sedan like a 3-Series, but as you go up in size you need to consider what looks right for the dimensions of the car you are actually designing. It’s not necessarily about right or wrong according to a set of rules, but what is appropriate for the car in question.

The new Charger is frustrating because it’s so nearly pretty decent. It was never going to match up to the seminal second-generation car, but as designers we need to keep our rose-tinted glasses in the drawer and judge the new one on its own merits.

One thing I do have to commend Dodge for is not redoing the Challenger all over again – which is the trap Ford and GM have fallen into. The Mustang and Camaro are fixated on their first-generation cars: making a copy of a copy of a copy that loses fidelity and clarity with each redesign. The new Charger brings a welcome dose of extra practicality to the market, but I can’t help but wonder if they’ve hedged their bets even further and made sure the Hemi V8 will fit come facelift time. If they have, it’s not hard to imagine this being on sale for fifteen years hence either.

All images courtesy of Stellantis Media.

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