Dodge CEO Strongly Hints at Return of V8 Dodge Charger

If you’ve been waiting for the timeline to right itself and present us with a new V8-powered performance car from Dodge, the departure of the notoriously anti-V8 Stellantis CEO Carlos Tavares probably left you feeling optimistic. Well, we might be able to do you one better.

Recently, The Drive had the opportunity to sit down with Dodge CEO Matt McAlear and pepper him with questions about the future of the company, and the somewhat polarizing launch of the electric 2024 Dodge Charger this winter, with its electric and inline-six powertrains. One thing we asked: does he have anything to say to people wondering if the Charger’s platform can physically fit a V8, and if Dodge is going to do it? His response? You can read it a few ways, but it’s absolutely not a no.

“If you look back across the last generation, you go through the engines between the Charger and the Challenger and the Magnum,” McAlear said. “We started out with a 3.5L V6, 6.1L V8, then a 3.6L V6, 5.7L V8, 6.4L, 6.2L, 6.2L Demon, 6.2L Redeye, 6.2L Demon 170. You know, how many different powertrains, RWD and AWD, did we have on those engines? This is a multi-energy platform that can accommodate all of that. This is just the first year, and you’ve got four powertrains that outperform every one that they’re replacing, with standard AWD? We’re just getting started. We’re going to have a lot of fun.”

Ticking off how many V8 engines the prior generation cars had is a quite a loaded answer. So we pressed harder: Is it going to happen?

“The only thing I can say is that if history can tell us anything about the future, with all those powertrains I listed off…” McAlear said. “You know, we’re always looking at ways to find best in class performance, to build on performance, and to push the boundaries. We don’t want to stand still at Dodge, and we don’t plan on it. There will be powertrain variations that continue to come. We haven’t even launched the SRT yet, so we still have to get into that. And who knows where we go if the business case makes sense [for a V8] and there’s potential.”

Given how on-message Dodge has been about the end of V8 production and the importance of a clean-sheet approach for a electric muscle car that moves the brand firmly into the future… this is just a very different answer than it’s ever given about its plans for the rest of the decade. There was a CNBC report in December about the end of Tavares’s reign at Stellantis that said the Charger was in fact originally meant to have a V8, but this is the first time a Dodge executive, let alone its CEO, has talked about an eight-cylinder performance car as anything other than part of its past.

Let’s talk about the Hellephant in the room: While the Hemi may be dying, it’s not actually dead yet. Dodge is still building Hemi-powered Durango R/T, SRT and Hellcat variants for the 2025 model year. Just how long should we expect that to continue?

“We haven’t disclosed that,” McAlear responded, “but one of the things that’s encouraging is that with the change in leadership, you know, V8s are no longer a bad word around the company. But with anything, we still have to be compliant.”

Compliance may seem like a dirty word in the Trump 2.0 era. Still, despite the president’s stated intention to reverse climate policies enacted by the Obama and Biden administrations, manufacturers work on timelines spanning longer than four years.

“We still have to find ways to keep the engines compliant,” McAlear said. “And just because there’s a change in the administration right now, that’s only a four-year deal, right? So you have to be careful and balance it across the entire portfolio in the long run.”

But why no more V8s in the meantime? Well, it’s not as simple as flipping a switch. Dodge learned this the hard way when it had to find a way to essentially un-cancel the V8 Durango at the last possible second.

“It always sounds easier than it is,” McAlear told us. “There are thousands of suppliers, right? And then you have emissions regulations that you always have to update your engines for, and typically that’s done from year to year, because any time you have [an] update for emissions, it’s just more money you have to put into it.”

“You don’t want to have to spend that money if you don’t have to,” he added, describing the precarious balance manufacturers must strike between future-proofing an engine and avoiding the potential inefficiencies of working too far ahead.

“That’s the nature of the beast in this entire industry,” he continued. “You can make the best plans in the world and write them all down on paper and say this is our two-year, three-year, four-year, five-year plan, but things are gonna change.”

With that constantly shifting timeline, Dodge’s hesitation to diversify its ICE lineup makes more sense. By the time a new engine would arrive, the regulatory climate may have already shifted dramatically.

“You can’t just turn something on that wasn’t there before,” McAlear continued. “Even if we were to say we wanted to do it today, pick any engine. A V10. A four-cylinder. It’s a year-and-a-half, two-year development cycle, right?”

In other words, even if Dodge is already seriously discussing throwing a Hemi in there, that decision can’t have been made more than a couple months ago, and it would take at least a couple years for a V8 Charger to hit the market. But hey, more time for the extended teaser campaign that would inevitably accompany it, right?

[Updated 2/10/2025: The story has been updated with additional quotes to better contextualize McAlear’s answers.]

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