- Dodge has an official recommendation for closing the hood of the Charger Daytona the right way.
- If owners don’t follow that recommendation, the hood latch may be damaged.
- Two cars were brought in for the same issue, likely because the hood was slammed shut.
The Dodge Charger Daytona is billed as the world’s most powerful muscle car, and it definitely has the oomph to back that claim. The top-tier Scat Pack comes with 670 horsepower and 627 pound-feet of torque, which is quite generous for a two-door machine. It can go from zero to 60 miles per hour in 3.3 seconds and go down the quarter mile in 11.5 seconds.
But the Daytona has had a lukewarm reception at best. For starters, it can’t do burnouts–that will be reserved for the SRT version that’s coming next year. Then, its road manners have been described by reviewers as “dreadful.” The fact that Stellantis, Dodge’s parent company, sold fewer than 2,000 electric Chargers in the first three months of this year isn’t helping the Daytona’s case either.
Now, though, there’s a new issue that owners–and potentially service centers–will have to be careful about. As spotted by MoparInsiders, the electric muscle car’s hood latch doesn’t seem to appreciate hood slamming very much. So much so, that Dodge tech Jordan Rose had two Chargers in for the same issue–a broken hood latch.
The mechanism is designed to pop open the hood after pressing a button inside, but it looks like slamming it closed could bend a metal component inside the latch. If this happens, the hood will no longer pop open after pressing the button–thankfully, there’s also a traditional manual release cable that gets the job done.
To prevent this from happening, Dodge has an official procedure in the workshop manual for closing the hood without doing any damage–that’s something I didn’t think would be necessary in 2025, but here we are.
As per the instructions, owners should gently lower the hood until it is resting on the latch mechanism. Then, with two hands on the center of the hood, above the latch mechanism, one should press down firmly until the hood is latched. The first point under the “Caution” portion of the instructions says to “not drop or forcefully close the hood” because it can cause damage.
The good news is that changing the hood latch is pretty straightforward, and any home mechanic could tackle it in a couple of hours. That said, owners should keep in mind that changing parts on their own could void the warranty–this is a brand-new car, after all.