Burnouts. They’re loud, anti-social, noxious, polluting, expensive, wasteful, and American as all hell. Sure, Australia also puts on some absolutely wicked smokeshows, but the standing burnout is one uniquely ingrained in not just the muscle car fandom, but American culture. They get the people going, and any muscle car ought to be able to light up its rear tires, right? Well, recent reports suggests the Dodge Charger Daytona EV might not be able to do that just yet.
It’s no secret that journalists and influencers have been able to get their hands on Dodge’s new electric hope, with media drive impressions dropping about a week ago. However, despite Dodge’s electric muscle car messaging, several outlets report that the Charger Daytona can’t do a muscle car party trick, and it all seems to come down to how it’s made.
To get a road car off the line really quickly, you pretty much need all-wheel drive. Traction is a limitation, and distributing torque through four contact patches generally offers more traction than distributing the same amount of torque to two contact patches. As such, to hit zero-to-60 mph in a claimed 3.3 seconds, Dodge equipped the Charger Daytona Scat Pack with a motor up front and a motor out back. Makes sense, right?
Unfortunately, all-wheel-drive isn’t usually conducive to burnouts, as the dual-motor arrangement will simply want to pull the car forward. At the same time, anti-pedal misapplication software means that pretty much all modern cars cut power when the accelerator pedal and brake pedal are applied simultaneously, or launch control might limit torque to the drive motors with both pedals depressed from a standstill. These days, cars like the Ford Mustang and the dearly departed Chevrolet Camaro offer line lock to lock the front brakes and let the rear wheels spin free for smoky burnouts. However, the new Charger Daytona reportedly can’t do a standing burnout. As per Motor Trend:
No matter what we tried, the electric Charger stubbornly rejected our efforts to announce its arrival to the world via smoke signals. It’s probably capable of doing one with a line lock feature, but inexplicably that’s the one toy Dodge failed to program in.
Huh, that seems suboptimal considering the client base the new Charger Daytona is aimed at. Line-lock is a curious claimed omission, and Stellantis has confirmed with us that it’s not present on the Charger Daytona. Considering the capabilities of modern anti-lock braking systems and the ability to just shut off current to the front electric motor, a burnout mode seems feasible, so the reported absence of one strikes us as odd. It’s worth noting that InsideEVs inquired about the same thing, and reports that “a Stellantis spokesperson confirmed to InsideEVs that Line Lock is not currently available on the Charger Daytona and that the brand didn’t have anything to share regarding any future plans for the feature.” Bummer.
At the same time, the new Charger Daytona also seems to have difficulties lighting its rear tires up from a launch, which although certainly not the fastest way of getting off the line, is definitely possible in some other performance EVs. YouTubers The Straight Pipes detailed all the ways they tried to get it to put on a show from a dig, and the closest they got was Sport mode, Powershot engaged, stability control fully off, and the Charger Daytona Scat Pack only lit up its front tires. Huh. While the Charger Daytona does offer a drift mode and a donut mode, it’s aimed at muscle car customers, so it should be able to get stupid in a straight line.
It’s worth noting that standing burnouts do have an actual use case in drag racing. If you’re running track-only slicks or even DOT-approved drag radials, these specially constructed tires like a bit of heat in them and like to be cleaned of any debris before going for a fast pass. A little burnout heats up the tires and scrubs them of any debris they might’ve picked up, getting them ready to launch off the starting beam.
Sure, a big electric coupe probably isn’t the first choice for a drag platform, but I bet you there’s someone crazy enough to slap some drag radials on a Charger Daytona Scat Pack and go for a hero time. For anyone looking to do that, a reported lack of any burnout mode doesn’t sound conducive to quarter-mile glory. A muscle car should be able to do a burnout, so fingers crossed, this might just be early-example weirdness and Dodge will eventually add line-lock to its electric muscle car.
(Photo credits: Dodge)
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Sniff
Corvettes have had this feature for years.
https://youtu.be/oebzAIZEfxQ
The short answer is that the “testers” were doing it wrong.
88 turbo wagon w full time 4wd can burn out. Discovered this in front of a police station. This is sad. If a buy here pay here shitbox can….
Road and track claim it can. There is a line lock mode,a donut mode, and a drift mode all which cut out the front motor. Either people didn’t know how to enable it, or dodge wanted to keep ham fisted journalists from hooning around. Thats just for ham fisted owners…
The more I find out about the Charger EV, the more I look at the Stellantis joint venture with the Chinese EV manufacturer Leapmotor. Why? Because it’s like they asked Leapmotor to design a Chinese knockoff of an American icon. Then the European execs, knowing nothing of real American muscle cars, green light it thinking it was a sure thing.
This car has absolutely nothing to do with Leapmotor.
Which doesn’t speak well for the future of Dodge if the best they could do was a Chinese knock-off clone.
What are you even saying? I don’t think you have a clue. The Charger is the first car developed on the Stella Large platform, which was developed wholly by the North American engineering team out of Auburn Hills, MI. Anything made or developed by Leapmotor is for Leapmotor. Nothing from Leapmotor has been rebadged or re engineered as any Stellantis brand at this time. It doesn’t mean that it can’t or won’t happen at some point, but it’ll take at least another five years before you would see anything like that reach showrooms.
I don’t think you know how the auto industry works and cars are engineered. Maybe stick to bicycles, kid.
Counter-point: Good! One less yahoo doing this at cars and coffee? Cool. Make someone modify it to get that functionality if they need it.
Stellantis has turned a bug into a feature.
Solution? Simple. Program the rear wheels to go into reverse with slightly less power than the fronts in burnout mode. Or put the fronts into full regeneration mode until the rears just lose traction, then apply full power to all wheels.
Result? Four wheel burnouts, a lot of replacement tire bills and a one way ticket to the nearest ditch or power pole.
Serious question to the drag racers out there. How much does the burnout really help? I watch a fair bit of NHRA and it always occurs to me that once you’ve backed it up, done all the last tuning fiddly bits and then the whole staging sequence, that the tires would have lost a fair amount of heat by the time the tree hits. I swear I’ve seen this take a minute or more.
It’s probably less so for a guy on drag radials without all that procedure and wasted time?
It’s to clean the tires off. They just drove through a “dirty” pit area.
It also makes a clean path for them. They probably soak up some traction compound in the process as well.
I’m pretty sure the heat makes the tires more porous and like Bjorn said this helps them soak up the traction compound. I think this is why you see them roll out of the burnout instead of just stopping.
In my autox experience lighting up the tires somewhere on the course will make them warm to the touch for at least a few minutes.
Depends on what type of tires you’re running. Street legal tires need no burnout at all. If you do a burnout on street tires, you are just wasting your tires and looking silly. Drag radials and slicks need a burnout to warm up,
So people are upset because the all wheel drive system is doing it’s job. Hilarious. Maybe they should offer a rear wheel drive only option?
They could just make a burnout mode and disable the front motors.
Good point. I was hoping that maybe a rwd option would be a wee bit less expensive. Then again, my interest is really the Hurricane.
Maybe you have no idea how little power can do a burnout. Even my 240hp suv can do 3 wheels off the line as no front lsd there. 300hp was enough for a sti to do 4.
Since the car can simulate engine noise via speakers, it seems that the obvious solution (especially given Chrysler’s track record with wonky electronics) is just to have a few wires available to short near the back wheels and cover everything with the smelliest electrical smoke know to humanity.
Probably already built-in and will happen automatically when the car hits 80,000 miles if my old Town & Country is any indicator.
Lucas Electrics! “Add your own replacement smoke!”
Where are the programmers located? If it is in a country without a burnout culture, they probably didn’t think about that feature.
Or Dodge is saving it for a ‘dealer installed option’ which is just a $950 charge for them to flip a bit in the software.
Put the front bumper against a wall, pour Dawn all over the tires, maybe put some lunch trays under them… That’s how we did it back in high school.
I don’t think lunch trays are what you want in this situation…
I used crabapples on a brick street in my mom’s car (‘89 Caprice). She still wonders about all the applesauce on the back of her car…
You just flashed me back to the 90s! We put lunch trays under back tires and pulled the e brake on the 1980s FWD junk we drove to slide around. 1$ Goodwill used metal baking pans last much longer and made for an exceptional spark show at night.
Burnouts in public places / streets are for fucktrumpets…
This car can’t do a burnout anywhere though…
I feel called out.
If there aren’t people around who cares? Very different story if there are people around.
On the one hand, GOOD, burnouts are idiotic. On the other hand, not being able to do them seems like a good way to not sell this car.
What percentage of current Challengers have done burnouts?
99.87% of all Challengers in a rental fleet.
Even *I*, who generally treats rental cars like I own them and think that burnouts are stupid, has done a burnout in a rented Hemi Challenger in the dead of night just because. So absolutely 100% of them have.
If the Mopar owners near me are anything to go by, about 95% of them and probably about the same for Chargers
It’s amazing how badly they have bungled this
There’s no limit to how badly they can bungle things.
I saw Bungle at HoB back in May, oh we’re talking about… nevermind.
It’s so thoroughly bungled, I wouldn’t be surprised if Mike Patton was involved.
Ah, nice to meet a fellow sophisticate with some musical culture 😉
Lol, I completely missed your comment and thought I was original.
It’s all good, your comment was wittier than mine 😉
This is such an egregious oversight that it must be deliberate.
Wait….maybe they plan to offer it only on subscription?
You can use the front motor for the line lock. At least, I’d be trying that solution if I was an engineer at Dodge. Seems like a timing thing. Lock the front, bump the current to the rear to full, instantly, and you’ll do a burnout. Seems simple.
Why even lock the front? Run front and rear in opposite directions, baby!
Holy fuck. It’s like the double ended dildo of burnouts. A party on both ends.
If you calibrated this correctly, after lighting up the rears you could slowly reverse the fronts to have the world’s first forward spinning backward moving burnout.
Couldn’t you just turn the front motor off altogether if that’s what you were aiming for? You’re still going to want to use it on the launch though so theoretically the front tires would still be in need of a burnout of their own.
I can turn traction control down significantly and do insane burnouts in my Rivian. We even get Rally Mode which is silly and I haven’t yet tried it.
This shouldn’t be a hard problem to solve.
Rivian has some of the best EV engineers and software in the game
….Dodge is owned by Stellantis
Stellantis just bought a large stake in Leapmotor. The latter probably runs a daycare for their employees.
Remember. It’s China. They probably teach Finite Elements and PDE in Pre-K.
At this point I’m convinced that they’ve intentionally botched the EV either to sell the ICE versions or get back at Tavares and his cronies
My thoughts exactly. This is going to perform worse than the Hornet.
Every exec at Dodge signed up to bring the old Charger’s back after Nissan did what they did with the Kicks yesterday.
Worse then the Hornet? Can you actually sell negative one units? Like, the general public owes Stellantis a car?
Yep, and it may be working. I couldn’t give a toss about the electric one, but a 500+ hp turbo I6 in a big comfy car…I find myself thinking about it.
And I’m sure Tavares is laughing all the way to the bank.
$39M in 2023, $22M in 2022. Yeah he is laughing from his beach house, or maybe his mountain chateau this week, with a petrol powered Ferrari in the driveway.