Are electric vehicles running out of charge? Why new performance heroes are good news for fans of six-cylinder and V8 engines as Ford Mustang and Dodge Charger stick with petrol

Is the Dodge Charger Daytona the canary in the coal mine for electric vehicles? A report from the US this week indicates the brand is rushing to get its twin-turbo six-cylinder petrol engine into showrooms six months ahead of schedule.

The speculation is this urgency has been motivated by an anticipation that the electric version of the Charger, due early in 2025, will be underwhelming. This represents a major backflip for the brand, which unveiled the ‘eMuscle car’ concept back in 2021 as a replacement for its 600kW ‘Hellcat’ supercharged V8 engine.

Former Dodge CEO Tim Kuniskis - who is widely credited as the ‘father of the Hellcat’ - was adamant in 2021 that the switch to electric was driven by performance as much as emissions.

“Even for a brand that’s known for pushing it a bit too far, we’ve pushed this pedal to the floor,” Kuniskis said at the time. “Our engineers are reaching a practical limit of what we can squeeze from internal combustion innovation. We know electric motors can give us more, and if we know of a technology that can give our customers an advantage we have an obligation to embrace it to keep them in the lead. We won’t sell electric vehicles, we’ll sell more motors. Better, faster Dodges.”

However, it didn’t take long for cracks in this argument to appear and development of the ‘Hurricane’ inline six-cylinder was ramped up alongside the electric version of the Charger. It now appears Dodge’s parent company, Stellantis, is looking to turn around the sales fortunes of its struggling American brands - Dodge, Jeep and Ram - anyway it can.

It speaks to the wider issue, the previously mentioned canary, that electric vehicles are simply not as popular in 2024 as car makers expected them to be a few years ago. Forecasts for widespread EV uptake were, at best, optimistic and car makers are now scrambling to rollback plans to go ‘all-electric’ within the next decade as it becomes increasingly clear that internal combustion engines [ICE] have more life in them than originally thought.

We recently reported that Porsche has publicly acknowledged this and is working on adapting its production plans to be more flexible in building ICE, EV and hybrid models in the foreseeable future.

Other brands, namely Toyota and Hyundai, have carefully hedged their bets, investing in electrification but retaining a core line-up of ICE models.

Stellantis has even had the same problem as the Charger at the other end of the spectrum, with its tiny Fiat 500e city car. Sales for this all-electric urban runabout have been so disappointing that the Italian brand had to pause production for an entire month in order to stop oversupply of the model.

Contrary to all of this, the Dodge Charger’s arch-rival, the Ford Mustang, has remained exclusively petrol-powered, with a 5.0-litre V8 and 2.3-litre turbocharged four-cylinder, with the Blue Oval committed to keeping it that way as long as regulations allow. And that will be the key for not only Ford but all brands, ‘as long as regulations allow’ because it seems customer demand for such engines isn’t going to disappear anytime soon.