[00:00] What is this, an F-14? What is this, Top Gun? I literally want it to just play Danger Zone immediately.
[00:15] You asked for it. You wanted it. The electric chargers, fake engine sounds. Nick, what mode are you in? I am in track. No, I'm in sport mode, actually. Go ahead, rabbit.
[00:30] Plymouth Prowler, right. And I wouldn't be doing my job if I didn't tell you that the giveaway for our Plymouth Prowler ends tonight.
[00:44] Go to fanofthem.com slash regularcars, the link's in the description. Pick up some merch, and you're automatically entered to win a car that really doesn't exist anymore. Dodge was on their A-game full of crazy.
[00:57] It's really the same stuff, the same mindset that made the EV Charger. It's so dumb to say the name of this car. The Dodge Daytona Charger EV.
[01:11] Sanatom.com slash regularcars. Pick up some limited edition merch, and you're automatically entered to win. You're keeping regular cars going, and one of you is going to get to drive a car that you're, I have not seen it.
[01:26] It's been over two months. I haven't seen another Plymouth Prowler. One person mentioned that there was a Plymouth Prowler parked on the street in your boathouse row. Yeah, silly stuff. But that was it.
[01:38] I drive this car almost every day. People look at it. It's tons of fun. It's goofy. It's weird. And you're helping out regular cars. Once again, fanofm.com slash regular cars.
[01:51] Links in the description. Help us out, and someone's going to win. Thank you so much. Back to the video. 2025 Dodge Charger Daytona EV. Hey, scumbags deserve EVs too.
[02:04] Turn up your volume if you want, because here comes the fake V8 noises. Hey, who am I to blame them? Okay, merge time. Slight chirp there.
[02:16] Okay, it's muscle car... Immediately, that's a pretty good speed. Scumbags are capable about caring about emissions and the environment. Scumbags can hate having to fill up at the gas station
[02:30] and having their ear talked off by a guy testing old gripes on a new audience. Scumbags can brag about all the money they're saving on fuel while the value of their car depreciates faster than fashion advice from a well-meaning relative.
[02:45] You drive a Dodge Charger Daytona EV. The world is made for you. Oh, hey. Today's episode of Regular Car Reviews is sponsored by Factor.
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[04:02] One free breakfast item per box for one year. All subscription is active. You need that nutrition. Oh, good. Thank you, Factor, for sticking with regular car reviews this whole time. Sorry for not eating eloquently.
[04:15] Once again, head to Factor75.com. Use my coupon code. regular FB50. That gets you the free breakfast. The link's in the description. I enjoy factor meals and you will too. With your eyebrows slit and your poorly defined ambitions, you moved out
[04:32] at 18 with no money and no plan, but now you're 22 and by God, you made it in the world of third party recruiting. Tell me again about how your favorite celebrity is in the files, but it's just
[04:46] a misunderstanding. You know, I was ready to hate on this car. Hate it because Dodge sold out its legendary Charger name to become just another soulless EV. I wanted to hate it because the
[05:01] financially troubled Solantis or FCA or whatever it's calling itself these days can't even build a commuter car that will outrun its warranty. I wanted to hate this because Dodge thinks it can
[05:15] win over divorced dads with a speaker in the bumper and crank your hog noises. And there are legit mechanical reasons to hate the Charger EV mainly because this car has blue itself twice leaving Jonathan the owner to coast it to the side of the New Jersey turnpike and turn it off and then turn it
[05:37] back on again to get this pile of Dodge to move. And he took it back to the dealer. And of course, they didn't find anything wrong with it, and they couldn't replicate the problem. And then on his own, Jonathan discovered that after he sent this car through an automatic
[05:53] car wash, you know, one of the good ones that sprays water up underneath the car, the charger would glitch out and turn off. So he took it back to the dealer and told them about it, but of course
[06:06] they couldn't find anything wrong. And then the tire pressure sensors, they just started to not work randomly, and it even happened during filming. Oh, there goes your GPS. I told you. He was at the dealer for that too, and they couldn't replicate the problem. And then the
[06:22] Reingard trim piece on the driver's side just flew off one day. So Jonathan went back to the dealer, and surprise, they fixed that. Jonathan has written physical letters to Stellantis, and then emailed as well,
[06:35] and then called repeated times, and finally managed to get a human being capable on the other line. But the most Stellantis will say is lawyered up non-statements.
[06:49] And yet, despite this EV being a pile of Dodge, this is the most entertaining electric car I've ever driven. It makes about 630 horsepower and 627 pound-feet of torque.
[07:03] It's all-wheel drive, of course. And the fake engines are corny. And, of course, you can turn them off if you want. But I believe this is what Dodge should be doing. Dodge has always been the upsetter.
[07:17] The cheeky troll. The manufacturer that makes the other manufacturers mad. This is the brand that made the Plymouth Prowler. He feels like a Nissan Leaf. But when you put this car in sport or track mode, it starts acting up.
[07:34] The accelerator pedal no longer becomes smooth. It's jerky. It's nasty. It bucks this car in a hilarious way. Moving off from a stoplight or a stop sign when you're in sport or track mode feels like you're brake-standing an imaginary transmission.
[07:54] The car rears back when you mash it on the highway. And it feels like a classic Dodge. The hood makes the front visibility poor, like an internal combustion charger.
[08:06] The driving position is lean back. You're filled with the same hell of your brother energy. Yeah, take your balls out while you drive. Drive next to a semi-truck with your window down.
[08:18] Blasting the limp biscuit cover of George Michael's face. Make you look. Make you look at here. The brain.
[08:30] Dodge. But there was some serious pushback, and there is serious pushback of the electric charger. Funny name, right? Because when they brought this car out, there was no, at the time, V8 Hemi Challenger Hellcat or whatever machine offered as a counterpoint.
[08:50] There's a V6, of course, but at the time it was just the electric one or the V6, no V8. And their Gen X inheritance from Morris goes, The world is going to hell.
[09:04] Now here come my practice political points, which I shall now recite. The Dodge Charger Daytona is a trend writer. It's the blind dater with shiftable values.
[09:16] The funniest joke is whatever joke you told last. He didn't wake up vegan this morning, but I guess he's giving up chicken tendies and chalky milk if it means a 10% chance of going adventuring in the Oranger Forest.
[09:29] The Challenger Daytona is reheating the Mach-E's nachos and pretending that anything it does is worth the $80,000 price tag. Holy wow.
[09:42] And all I can think is that this car, this build, it was built from bottom up for men who like being sold things. $80,000 for this?
[09:55] For an EV that falls apart? What is this, a Tesla? Yeah, come on, man. Overcome my objections. Yo, yo, I'm a customer. Talk me into your product. Well, as you can see here, the Dodge Charter Daytona comes with...
[10:10] That's old. Who is this electric muscle car for? And who asked for it in the first place? It might be the world's first postmodern Charger. In the same way, the Mustang Mach-E is a postmodern Mustang.
[10:24] It contains all the signs and signifiers of the original article, but none of its mechanical reality. This is digital theater with a fake engine noise that is basically a three-second loop that oscillates in a way no car actually does.
[10:41] Listen to it. This sounds like a person trying to describe a troubling sound to their mechanic from memory No engine sounds like this Even multi fuel injection even direct injection has some randomness to it This is making the same kind of engine sounds that
[11:09] all the Fast and the Furious knockoff video games that showed up in the bargain bin at Walmart back in the 2000s. This is the sound these engines made in those, like, PS1 games. Oh, no, wait,
[11:21] mid-2000s, that was PS2. What am I talking about? Dodge calls this imaginary exhaust the flat-sonic chambered exhaust. Okay. It's the same technology that goes into Bose speakers.
[11:33] You take a speaker, put some tubes in front of it, sound bounces around and sounds better somehow. And you know, it's kind of fitting because if I had to name this automated exhaust sound based on the type of guy I thought would appreciate it, I'd have to put the word flat in there somewhere.
[11:51] Ugh, this engine sound. It's funny in the beginning. It sounds like it's been filtered through Winamp and optimized for people who spend Saturday nights doing street takeovers and high-speed weaving
[12:04] and other kinds of clout crime. Because they're privileged, but not the kind of privilege that allows them to get away with doing real crime. As you drive this thing, like, okay, if you have some rando who isn't in the cars,
[12:16] you pick them up and miss, and they somehow ignored the cyberpunk engine startup that I guess is supposed to sound like a supercharger spooling up.
[12:30] You somehow didn't hear the weird supercharger sound and you just started driving and they weren't paying attention. I guess they wouldn't notice that it's not real. And I'm talking about people who change their oil when the oil light comes on.
[12:46] The kind of people who run out of gas because, I don't know, I just don't pay attention. Those people may be fooled by the engine sound. Settings, and it's electric drive, and that's just a braxonic chambered exhaust.
[13:02] Braxonic chambered exhaust. And it's nice. Electric drive, that drive theme. Yeah. What is drive theme? Drive theme would be sound changes and forces with your mode you're in.
[13:17] Okay. So sport has a distinct sound. Track is a little louder, a little more aggressive than the drag mode is allowed. Okay. And this is just their techno babble. That's their first speaker.
[13:30] That's their patented, you know, technology. This is postmodern because the charge of Daytona is performing the role of a muscle car. And I think it's ultimately up to the individual as to whether or not it succeeds in that role.
[13:47] If nothing else, this has more personality than a lot of internal combustion options because it's not pretending to be this lean, futuristic EV. It's not aerodynamic. It has this weird split in the front that maybe is doing something.
[14:01] But this car leans into absurdity. And yes, it is a big, heavy muscle car that just happens to lack a muscle car's most identifiable component. And I can appreciate that.
[14:13] It has an actual sense of humor rather than a personality borrowed from shitposts. It has the fake musculature of a child's Halloween costume. It's perfect for someone who wants their EV to not look like an EV.
[14:27] The Daytona is a postmodern gamble because it's not that Dodge thinks you're too stupid to notice it's just a more polished version of something grittier. They're just hoping the performance makes it so you don't care.
[14:40] And yes, 620 horsepower is plenty. This is faster than most other cars on the road. It will embarrass classic challengers and all muscle cars going back in the 2000s.
[14:54] This is a demon. and the width of these tires drives it home. And it's practical. Kinda. It's a big hatch in the back. The dual motor all-wheel drive system does put out 630 horsepower,
[15:08] but you can get another 40 horsepower by pressing the power shut button. I don't know what this is. I guess they nerf it to 630 and give you this little, like, afterburner button
[15:20] that gets you 670 horsepower. Yeah, cute. Nice. This will narrowly beat a Hellcat Redeye in 0-60. I believe the Daytona EV is 3.3 seconds to 60, while the Hellcat Redeye is 3.6.
[15:38] Now, the EV range of this is only 241 miles. That's not great. The average these days is about 280, and any EV that's worth its money is over 300.
[15:50] But I guess those are sacrifices that get made in the name of performance and a compelling design, right? Except most of this car is reused interchangeable Wagoneer S technology and hardware.
[16:02] So why does this cost almost $80,000 large right off the rip? How hard was Dodge overplaying its hand with this thing? At $40,000, this would have been an easy sell.
[16:14] Hell, even at $50,000, maybe. But $80,000, that's a huge ask. It smacks of desperation because it tells the world that, well we saw that EVs were in and we wanted to get in on it before it was too late except it took us too long to make this so now no one cares But now we need to make our money back so Hey is cool Yeah we need
[16:36] Stellantis was basically telling people that this was corporate executives attempting to reverse-engineer an easy muscle market by giving fans of the charge of no other choice, rather than presenting it as an alternative worth taking a chance on.
[16:48] In a very fear-and-loathing kind of way, this was too weird to live, too rare to die. except now the EV tax credit is gone and the value of these Daytona EVs are plummeting to the price
[17:02] that it probably should have been in the first place. These things are about $40,000 used. This is probably still too high, especially for a car with more bugs than a Jacksonville windshield. This is barely a year old and stuff breaking.
[17:16] So it's a true Dodge, isn't it? You get an EV and you get the full Dodge experience. Sometimes the trunk won't open. So Jonathan keeps his jump pack in the front. Why does he need a jump pack?
[17:29] Well, okay, all EVs still have the lead-acid traditional car battery, as well as their drive battery, the big battery that runs the car, that propels the car. The traditional car battery is still needed to boot the computer
[17:43] and run all the accessories as the drive battery is waking up. You know, it's only a few seconds, but the traditional car battery is still necessary. And if that battery, the car can't start on its drive battery.
[17:58] It needs that EverReady or Interstate or DECA or DieHard, whatever you put up there, it needs that to start. Now, in an internal combustion car, the alternator is charging the battery as you drive, but that doesn't exist in an EV.
[18:13] So, the drive battery has to then trickle charge the little lead acid battery. My Kia EV does this. Occasionally, I'll come into the garage and the car's not plugged in,
[18:26] and I'll just see one light little blinking on the front of the dash. That just means, okay, I'm trickle charging the battery for like an hour. Don't worry. It's only going to cost you like a mile or two to make sure that thing's topped up. But on this Charger Daytona EV, that sometimes doesn't work.
[18:40] The car forgets to do that. So he comes out with a full drive battery, but a dead car battery. So you have to open up the front, get out his little wolf box or whatever, go right on the terminal, fire it up, and then fire it up at the dodge.
[18:57] So should you buy one of these things? Well, as Jonathan is going to explain, while these things are very expensive to purchase, they're very inexpensive to lease. I mean, there are a lot of dealers out there looking to move these because they've been sitting on them forever because nobody's bought them.
[19:15] I mean, I think I've seen, I think in the whole time I've owned this, I've seen two others on the road, maybe three. So, yeah, it definitely has not been a success.
[19:27] The lower trim version that's called the RT, they already canceled because of poor sales. So this one they kept, and they brought out a four-door version of this car as well
[19:41] to go alongside the gas-powered ones, which is probably what they should have done from the beginning. My opinion is the biggest reason this car has been a failure, has been sales-wise and perception-wise for a lot of people,
[19:54] is that they shoved it down everybody's throat as an EV only from the get-go. They brought this out at the same time as, say, I mean, I know they have the six-cylinder versions right now. They haven't gone to an eight-cylinder yet, which people are still not happy about.
[20:08] Right. But if they had an eight-cylinder option as their top end and they had the six-cylinder to go with it, oh, and by the way, if you like EVs, here's one for you too, I don't think people would have had the same visceral reaction to it.
[20:22] But they chose not to go that direction. If you feel like driving an EV and you're going to lease and you want something quirky, This may be, hey, as long as you're not locked into a big lease,
[20:36] this could be an entertaining car to have for a while. Just make sure you have that jump pack. Can you do a burnout? Not really. It's too heavy to do a proper burnout. Yeah, there's a drift mode and a donut mode that can send the car sideways a little bit,
[20:49] but you're not smoking these big fat tires, especially with all this weight pushing down on them. And no one was going to sign up to be the first one to lose their asses on this car. People were wise to wait this thing out, because the only way this car makes sense is as a used model that you can get on the cheap.
[21:05] And I'm not against hopping on bandwagons, but it's got to be worth the risk of pulling a hamstring in the first place. And I'm not sure that's ever been the case with a Charger Daytona EV. So my advice, either find a really good lease deal or wait it out.
[21:20] Because like the old saying, it's safer to pick up a knife from the ground than try to catch one as it's falling. RCR merch, I don't talk about this enough. We got the bucket hats. They're in stock. This is all on fourth wall.
[21:33] If you're watching it on YouTube, you can just click on it right down below. That's where you find all our merch. We have regular car reviews. This is the one with the outline of the Pennsylvania State logo because RCR will remain in Pennsylvania for all of eternity.
[21:46] We're never going to California. Never. Here's just a regular RCR shirt. I didn't take it out of the bag yet, but there it is. And for people who like characters, this is remote. Those of you who know what this is, you know what this is.
[21:58] And that's available on 4th of all too. Thank you.