Dodge dropped a 15-second teaser Tuesday that left almost nothing to decode. Bees swarming a drag strip Christmas tree, Wiz Khalifa’s “Black and Yellow” on the soundtrack, and a reveal date of August 7, 2026. The Super Bee is back.
The nameplate, born in 1968 as Dodge’s no-frills muscle car for budget-minded drag racers, is returning to a Charger lineup that has struggled to find its footing since the controversial relaunch. Only this time, there’s no Hemi under the hood.
Dodge confirmed the teaser is for “the most powerful sixpack-powered Charger,” which translates from marketing speak into a hotter version of the Hurricane turbocharged inline-six. The current Charger Scat Pack already wrings 550 horsepower and 531 lb-ft of torque from Stellantis’s high-output Hurricane. Whatever the Super Bee packs, it will need to top those numbers to justify the name.
Dodge CEO Matt McLear telegraphed this move back in March. “We’re gonna continue to push the limits of this engine and see what it can do,” he told The Drive. The Hurricane architecture was always designed with headroom in mind, and a 600-plus horsepower target seems like the obvious play for a halo variant wearing a heritage badge.
The reveal lands one day before Dodge’s 2026 Road Kill Nights, the automaker’s annual celebration of tire smoke and quarter-mile heroics. That timing is deliberate. Dodge needs a shot of adrenaline for a car that has divided its own fanbase since launch day.
The Super Bee isn’t even the first insect-themed revival from Stellantis this year. In May, the 2027 Ram SRT Rumble Bee showed up with a 777-horsepower supercharged 6.2-liter Hellcat V8 under its hood. That truck got eight cylinders and a blower. The Charger Super Bee gets six cylinders and a pair of turbochargers.
That split tells you everything about where Stellantis is hedging its bets. The Hellcat V8 still lives, just not in the Charger yet. Stellantis announced a sweeping turnaround plan in May calling for 60 new vehicles and 50 refreshes by 2030. Buried in that roadmap is a new Charger SRT wearing a massive rear wing that echoes the Superbird era. That car almost certainly gets a Hellcat-derived Hemi.
But for now, the Charger remains a six-cylinder car, and Dodge is leaning hard into making that acceptable to a crowd that worships displacement. The Super Bee badge carries weight. It was the people’s muscle car in 1968, cheaper than the R/T, stripped of luxury, built purely to go fast.
Putting it on a turbo six is either a bold reinterpretation or a provocation, depending on which side of the pony car wars you sit. The original Super Bee cost $3,027 and came with a 335-horsepower 383 V8. It was honest and uncomplicated.
Whether a force-fed inline-six can carry that same spirit is the question Dodge will have to answer on August 7. The rocky launch of the new Charger platform has given skeptics plenty of ammunition. Build quality complaints, delayed variants, and a fanbase that still mourns the Hellcat have all clouded the car’s reception.
A properly executed Super Bee could shift that narrative. A botched one will deepen the wound. Dodge has seven days to make its case.
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