Dodge Charger Daytona EV Cargo Test: How Big Is the Trunk?

• The electric Dodge Charger's trunk volume is 22.7 cubic feet.
• It has a hatchback. The old Challenger had a (big) regular trunk.
• Our real-world test shows how much stuff the trunk can hold. 

The Charger trunk is indeed quite large, especially in terms of length. I had to crawl inside just to secure the rear LATCH anchor on my son's car seat. 

As you can see, though, the liftgate has quite the slope to it, resulting in a triangular-shaped cargo area. As we learned from the Porsche Taycan, that's not a good thing when loading rectangular objects. As a reminder, this is not the Giant Wedge of Cheese Test. 

There is a cargo cover, but it is a mesh shade. I couldn't figure out if it could flip and fold like a sun visor (or the Mustang Mach-E's similar shade), but it's so thin, I was confident that it could just be plopped on top of what Tetris formation I came up with. Spoiler: I could. Let's just skip the photo.

There is technically an underfloor storage area, but you could maybe fit a cereal box inside. No help here.

On to the bags. Here's some nice boilerplate information about the bags I use and their dimensions. There are two bags you'd definitely have to check at the airport: Big Gray (26 inches long x 16.5 inches wide x 12 inches deep) and Big Blue (26 x 16.5 x 10). There are three roll-aboards that usually fit as carry-on: Medium Tall (24 x 14 x 9), Medium Wide (23 x 15 x 9) and the smaller Green Bag (21 x 14 x 9.5). Finally, there's everyone's favorite Fancy Bag (21 x 12 x 11), a medium-size duffle.

That would be all the bags described above. They all fit, and there's no doubt that the hatchback made it easy to load from a physical perspective (unlike the Mustang, more on that later), but that triangular shape made it quite difficult from a spatial orientation perspective. 

Turns out, the Fancy Bag was the perfect shape for the residual triangular space. 

By contrast, my smallest regular bag prevented the hatch from closing despite having enough floor space to lie on its belly. Like the Taycan, therefore, the Challenger struggles to take full advantage of its total volume due to its shape. 

As such, the best amount of stuff I could achieve came by adding a second duffel bag of roughly equal size to the Fancy Bag. This is still exceptionally good for a two-door car sold after, I don't know, 1984. The current Mustang can also technically fit my bags, but it was extremely difficult to do so and I doubted it could have if they were fully packed. The Charger is way better than the Mustang. Not even close. 

That said, I feel very confident saying the old Challenger trunk was superior. If I go with the assumption that it could match the Honda Accord's trunk, I'd be looking at all my standard bags, plus that blue duffel plus the 38-quart cooler I typically use to fill up extra space in SUVs and wagons. That's just an assumption, but it really was an enormous trunk. 

So yeah, one more reason to bemoan the new Charger, but I'm ultimately still walking away impressed by this coupe's ability to hold stuff. Heck, it'll still be good if the upcoming Charger sedan matches it.