- Reviewers have discovered that the Dodge Charger Daytona can’t do a burnout
- The Line Lock feature, which disables the front electric motor and locks the wheels, was inexplicably missing from test cars at the launch event.
- Dodge doesn’t have anything to share about future plans to enable or include Line Lock
The Dodge Charger Daytona is out and the first reviews are finally hitting the streets. Critics seem to love the car, mostly, especially since it’s one of the first performance EVs specifically aimed at roping in gearheads away from gas-powered, tire-slaying, row-your-own combustion cars. That’s not an easy feat, but as many of those who have already made the switch can tell you—the instant torque delivered by an EV can be far from tame.
But there’s one particular quirk about the Charger Daytona that we can’t quite overcome. Despite Dodge marketing the Charger as an electrified muscle car, it lacks the ability to perform of the most basic hooning features that any red-blooded, high-performance American coupe should be able to do: a burnout.
Photo by: InsideEVs
News of the missing feature first came to us while skimming through MotorTrend’s first drive review of the Charger Daytona. During their time with the car, MotorTrend noticed that (for some unfathomable reason) it was impossible to get the car to do a burnout. No amount of fiddling with the controls and gas pedal could yield a brakestand.
Here’s what caught our eye from MotorTrend:
In fact, the Charger Daytona won’t do a burnout. 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.
Surely that can’t be right.
Dodge, the company that just said it was going to save the world from “lame, soulless, weak-looking, self-driving, sleep-pods” by giving the world a battery-powered muscle car, wouldn’t have made it so that flagship EV was incapable of spinning its rear tires in an impressive cloud of vaporized rubber… right?
Maybe there’s a good reason for it. Let’s remember here that the Charger Daytona comes exclusively in all-wheel drive. That means dual 335-horsepower motors at the front and rear wheels, creating a combined output of 670 horsepower and 627 pound-feet of instant, electrified torque. That’s plenty of power for some big number 11s on the pavement.
We dug into this quirk a bit more to find out exactly what was going on. As mentioned, the Charger Daytona is AWD, so in order to do a traditional burnout, it would need to cut power to the front wheels—which it should be able to do since an EV doesn’t need to mechanically separate the front and rear drivetrains given that they are completely separate from one another.
Dodge calls this feature “Line Lock”—a term that’s been around since mid-century in the drag racing scene. Its name is quite literal and refers to locking pressure in the front brake lines of a car to keep pads in contact with the rotors and prevent the front wheels from turning. The driver can then mash the gas pedal and heat up the rear tires before sending the car down the drag strip.
The idea is similar for the Charger Daytona. Turning the feature on would disable power to the front motor to prevent the wheels from turning, lock the front brakes and let the rear motor unleash its full torque output.Hell, Dodge even brags about the ability to “add in Line Lock for smoky burnouts” on the website for the Charger Daytona.
But there’s just one problem: the Charger Daytona doesn’t have the Line Lock feature. In fact, 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.
Well, folks, I hate to break it to you, but that’s the world we’re living in. The Dodge Charger Daytona—the world’s first mass-produced modern electric muscle car—can’t do a burnout. At least not yet, and whether or not it will get an update to add Dodge’s Line Lock feature in the future is anybody’s guess.
Sure, it can do other cool things. Drift mode gets rowdy and even performs the decoupling of the front electric drive motor. That makes it even more puzzling that Line Lock isn’t available for this same function. I know this isn’t the end of the world, but it seems like such a missed opportunity to include a basic muscle car feature on what is being marketed as the first modern electric muscle car. Maybe that’ll change in the future, but for now, I’m going to go sit in the corner and wonder what we did to deserve this.