There are two interesting influences, among many, that Jeff Gale, director-Dodge and SRT Interior at Stellantis, says his division took in before work on the Dodge Charger Daytona commenced in 2021.

The car, a 2025 Wards 10 Best Interiors & UX award-winning model, recalls the past, but has a clear focus on the future of auto interiors and user-experience design and technology.

The first interesting influence, the Spring Festival of LX, indeed recalls an older generation Charger, although not as far in the past as one may initially think.

Gale tells WardsAuto the SoCal enthusiast-started event – dedicated to the LX platform that served as the underpinnings for the Chrysler 300, Dodge Magnum and Dodge Charger in the mid-2000s – allowed designers and engineers to see how Charger owners had customized their cars and to spend time talking with them to find out what they’re interested in.

Clinics are typically held during product development. But the Spring Festival of LX was more about crowd sourcing than regimented checklist surveying.

Of the second influence, digital gaming culture, one of the things designers were keen on doing in developing the new-generation Charger – this generation based on the automaker’s new STLA Large platform – was to appeal not only to the stalwart Charger owners but also to a new, generally younger, group of buyers, says Ryan Nagode (pictured below), vice president – head of Interior Design at Stellantis’ Chrysler, Dodge, Jeep and Ram brands.

Consequently, for the vehicle’s user-experience technology, both the 16-in. (40.6-cm) gauge cluster and the 12.3-in. (31.2-cm) infotainment display, are fully animated and packed with driver-oriented and mode-specific information. For example, recognizing this will be a vehicle that people are going to take to the track, there is the ability to select Track or Drag mode, and then to make specific selections based on whether one is going to take it on turns or straight down a quarter mile. (View slideshow: 2025 Wards 10 Best Interiors and UX winner Dodge Charger Daytona)

And, of course, because the Charger is a battery-electric vehicle, there is information about the battery state of health. (However, Nagode notes that this was intended from the start to be a multi-energy vehicle, so a 3.0L, twin-turbo Hurricane inline-6 is coming soon.)

In another acknowledgement of how gamers interact with screens, they designed buttons for the steering wheel so there is ready control at hand. Gale points out that when developing this approach, they worked closely with the engineering team to make sure there was no interference with the packaging of the airbag.

Nagode points out that often when a new vehicle is being developed from an older nameplate, the influencer vehicle is brought out of a heritage center and put in the studio throughout the entire development program. Not so with the 2025 Charger. Although they wanted to acknowledge the historical touchpoint of the Charger, he says the 1968 model came and went. (If members of the design team needed more time with it, they could go to the Dodge Conner Center – a heritage and event venue previously used as the Conner Avenue Assembly Plant.)

A number of vehicles that had been customized using lighting to define things like theme lines on the sides of vehicles was one of the things Gale (pictured below) says they noticed at the Spring Festival of LX.

Gale continues that the lighting was something that intrigued them, so combining light with textures and patterns throughout the cabin became a key area of focus. Textured and patterned surfaces, both on the instrument panel and on the doors, channel light. There are 64 hues – called “Attitude Adjustment Lighting” – that can be selected via the center touchscreen.

Gale says they worked with engineering to make sure that the lighting was visible during the day, as well as at night.

Another thing related to the lighting that goes back to the gauge cluster and the selectable modes are graphic changes when different modes are chosen; Gale says this is something that only an OEM can do, as these color changes are predicated on information from a control unit related to the powertrain.

Nagode switches the subject to another aspect of “light” – this one as in mass.

He points out that in the previous-generation Charger there is “one big, giant instrument panel.” An issue with that is it doesn’t allow modifications.

So, for the ’25 model’s instrument panel they took cues not from muscle cars, but supercars, and worked to lighten the approach and use modular elements such that in future models there can be changes to the IP.

Which brings up an important aspect of the car’s interior design: thinking of what it will look like in the future.

Speaking of the design execution from the beginning stages, Nagode says when his team is starting a project, “We’re always thinking about: ‘What’s the end of the life of that product?’

“We’d better be trying to know where things are going. We ask ourselves what’s four, five years down the road? What’s the right product for that point in time. You have to keep (the entire lifecycle) in mind to keep it fresh.”