Dodge bet its entire muscle car relaunch on the idea that buyers wanted an electric Charger badly enough to make it the face of the brand. Eighteen months later, the numbers Stellantis itself filed in its first-half 2026 U.S. sales report tell a different story. The gas-powered Charger, built around the twin-turbo Hurricane inline-six that Dodge markets as the Sixpack, is outselling the Charger Daytona EV by a margin that keeps widening every quarter. You don’t need an analyst to explain what’s happening on dealer lots — the paperwork already backs up what salespeople have been watching happen car by car.
The Numbers Straight From Stellantis
According to Stellantis’s own first-half 2026 U.S. sales report, the gas Charger moved 2,911 units in the second quarter alone, a 404 percent jump over the same quarter a year earlier. The Charger Daytona EV, broken out separately in Stellantis’s own tables as “Charger BEV,” sold just 294 units over that same three months. Stack the first six months together and the gap only gets more lopsided: 4,583 gas Chargers sold against 534 electric ones, a split of roughly 8.5 to 1 in favor of the engine Dodge didn’t build its comeback marketing around. MoparInsiders pulled the identical line items straight from that release, so this isn’t a rounding quirk from one outlet’s math. It’s what Stellantis told its own investors.
Zoom into the first quarter and the pattern was already locked in. AutoGuide reported that of the 1,912 total Chargers Dodge sold in Q1 2026, only 240 were the Daytona EV, about 12.5 percent of the nameplate’s volume. That’s a steep drop from the 1,947 electric Chargers Dodge moved in the same quarter a year earlier, back when the EV was the only Charger you could actually buy. A Cars.com report from May 2026 confirms that same 240-unit Q1 figure independently, which matters when you’re trying to trust a number this stark.
Why the Sixpack Keeps Winning
None of this should shock anyone who’s actually cross-shopped the two cars. The Sixpack’s Hurricane inline-six makes up to 550 horsepower in Scat Pack trim, sounds like an engine instead of a household appliance, and refuels in five minutes at any gas station in the country. The Daytona EV counters with instant torque and a synthesized exhaust note, called Fratzonic, pumped through speakers to give electric muscle car buyers something to rev. Reviewers were split on whether a soundtrack replaces displacement. The sales data suggests plenty of buyers didn’t stick around to find out — they walked past the EV on the showroom floor and bought the one with a gas cap.
There’s a supply and timing wrinkle tangled up in these figures too. Dealers spent much of 2025 and early 2026 working through Daytona EV inventory that arrived before the gas car did, and Dodge only started shipping Sixpack models in real volume in late 2025. Even giving the EV every benefit of that rollout lag, an 8.5-to-1 gap in the gas car’s favor isn’t a launch hiccup you shrug off. It’s a verdict buyers reached with their own money, delivered over two full quarters of head-to-head competition rather than a single soft month that could get explained away by a chip shortage or a slow production ramp.
What It Means for Dodge’s EV Bet
Dodge isn’t pulling the plug on the Daytona despite the numbers. The same Cars.com reporting notes the Daytona EV is moving ahead with 2027 updates, including NACS charging port compatibility, even as sister EVs elsewhere in the Stellantis portfolio, like the Jeep Wagoneer S, get their production paused to buy time for better batteries and software. That’s a telling contrast: Dodge is refining the EV rather than walking away from it, but it’s doing so from a position where the car it was supposed to make obsolete is outselling it nearly nine to one.
Dodge spent years telling anyone who’d listen that the Daytona was the future of the brand, proof that muscle and electrons weren’t a contradiction. Instead, the company accidentally ran the cleanest test imaginable: two Chargers, same body, same dealer floor, one gas and one electric, on sale side by side at the same time. Buyers ran that experiment for Dodge and already turned in their results, and no amount of Fratzonic is going to argue them out of the answer they gave.