A lot of people dream about owning sporty sedans that would make other drivers drool as you drive past, and many of those same people never own that dream car because they think it’s not affordable or practical. Stop dreaming. Owning a sports car is not only affordable but as practical as owning one of those boring grey or tan sedans that fades into the river of traffic on the highway. Why be forgettable when you could own a vehicle as head-turning as a 2020 Dodge Charger? This is not just a beefy engine in a stylish body; the Dodge Charger has a fully functional interior fit for your family, along with trunk space, infotainment, and driver-assisted safety features just as good as those boring sedans – without being boring.
Love at First Sight
Everyone knows that love begins with what you see, and when you see a Dodge Charger, your eyes will feast on the beauty of shapely curves, a boldly upturned grin of a grille, and a spoiler of a tail that says air will caress this car as it winds along the roadways. Every Charger comes with those eyebrow-like LED daytime running lights, and the trims will add the option of a scooped hood, sunroof, or stylish two-tone paint if you want to splurge. What might be the most fun exterior can be found in the wide-body Scat Pack models, which add three and a half inches to the fender flares to accommodate almost obscenely wide wheels for high-speed performance.
Unlike its muscle car sibling, the Dodge Challenger, the Charger has four doors, which makes it easy to use the Charger as a family car – except loading kids into the back seat of a Charger is way cooler than what most families are using for transport. If you live in a snowy climate and are worried about losing out on your all-wheel drive, you can relax. The 2020 Charger offers an all-wheel drive in both the SXT and GT trims. And fuel efficiency doesn’t need to be a concern, either. The Charger with the base V6 engine will get 19 MPG in the city and an excellent 30 MPG on the highway. Even with all-wheel drive, it only drops to 18 MPG and 27 MPG, which is just as good as the big SUVs everyone seems to want to drive these days.
Slip into Something More Comfortable
While the main goal of a Charger is to be a performance-oriented sedan, it will make you right at home when you lower yourself into the embrace of the body-hugging seats that have lumbar control even for the base trim and enough legroom for adults to ride in the back seat. Whether you go with the leather, the houndstooth, or the faux suede, the seats are supportive for comfortable all-day driving. A seven-inch touchscreen is standard and comes loaded with the Uconnect system for infotainment. The Charger also provides access to performance feature settings like drive modes, traction control, and even a burn-out feature if you purchase the Scat Pack trim. If you’re the kind of parent who loves the idea of burning out of the mall parking lot to get your kids giggling like maniacs, you need a Charger.
Again, even though the Charger’s focus is performance, Dodge thoughtfully includes conveniences to make it family-friendly. The back seat is a 60/40 split that can fold down for transporting large items, and the trunk actually has 16.5 cubic feet of cargo space on its own. That’s larger than the average midsize sedan trunk by a foot and a half, which means you have plenty of room for strollers, diaper bags, and whatever other gear you need to haul around for your little ones.
Those back seats also have all the same tethers, airbags, and child safety locks as the ho-hum four-cylinder you might be considering. Other standard safety features like stability control with anti-roll, rear parking sensors, and electronically-assisted braking will keep your family safe on the road to avoid accidents. When you’re not in the vehicle, it’s protected by an engine immobilizer that locks up the ability to drive the car if it senses unauthorized entry.
When the Rubber Meets the Road
Now, for the most fun part of owning a vehicle with its roots in NASCAR racing: how it drives. There are no wrong answers when it comes to the trim level since even the less expensive trims are equipped with satisfying 3.6-liter V6 engines paired with an eight-speed automatic transmission. Rear-wheel drive is standard, which means an overall more engaging experience than those dull front-wheel drive cars. With the V6, you can also have all-wheel drive, which seems like a fairy godmother of car performance came to grant the Charger with all the ideal traits any car buyer could possibly want. What’s nice is that if you also happen to enjoy racing, say, motorbikes, you can tow up to 1,000 pounds with the V6, which is good enough to pull a bike on a trailer.
For those who are concerned with details like suspension and tires, the 2020 Charger rear suspension is a multi-link set-up to offer a smooth interior ride that also allows for road-hugging, and the tires were developed for road grip and better handling at high speeds. All this slinky outfitting is just for the lower-priced Chargers, so if you have some extra cash to drop on one of the more well-endowed trims, you could have an RT Scat Pack with a 6.4-liter V8 that rumbles out a satisfying 485 horsepower with 475 lb-ft of torque. That trim will only set you back $40,495, and it will add on some fun exterior features like a scooped hood, decklid spoiler, fog lights, and automatic perimeter-approach lights. For $6,000 more, you can have the Scat Pack Widebody with those ridiculously wide wheels that are called devil rims.
But why go middle of the road when you can go all the way? The SRT Hellcat Widebody might as well be considered an out-of-body experience because that’s how you will probably feel when you hit the gas. With a 6.2-liter V8 under the hood, this car is made for the track. One wonders how this car is even legal with the amount of power it offers, with 707 horsepower and a mind-bending 650 lb-ft of torque. Maybe this one is better without the kids in the back seat. You might incur a lot of speeding tickets with this road-ravaging machine, and you wouldn’t want to set a bad example. Save this car for those moments when you feel the need to escape diapers and tantrums, all of which will be therapeutically drowned out with the roaring of the delectable Hellcat engine. You and the road. Heaven.
A Vanishing Breed
While most manufacturers are ending production of their sedans in favor of yet another hum-drum SUV, Dodge continues to push the boundaries of the family sedan, delivering maximum fun with all the safety and convenience of all-wheel drive and electronic safety measures. How many SUVs have a NASCAR history? Oh, none? Right. While the crickets chirp, you can also think about how many other vehicles cost a lot more to deliver less in terms of both performance and comfort. You really can’t lose with a 2020 Dodge Charger. It has the looks, the brains, and even the spirit of what a muscle car has always been, just made even better with all the modern tech to make the power under the hood a prize you can handle.
