Dodge never built a vehicle with a butterfly door design. Dodge Chargers have always been made with traditional door designs, except for the Dodge Charger III concept car, which featured a flip-up canopy door. If you want vertical doors on your Dodge Charger, you’ll need to make your own aftermarket modification.
Proper “butterfly” door kits are not very common. Most of the vertical door kits that you find online will be referred to as scissor doors or vertical lambo doors. We’ll go over the nuances between these terms, and we’ll also talk about how you can get some snazzy bolt-on Lambo doors for your Dodge
. What Dodge Charger has butterfly doors?
No Dodge Charger model has ever come with butterfly doors.
There was one Dodge Charger concept car that had a canopy door, but every other Charger that has been made had traditional door designs.
What are butterfly doors?
Butterfly doors are vertical doors that are attached to a car along its A-pillars, which are the angled pillars that hold the windshield. In order to best explain what sets butterfly doors apart from other alternative door concepts, let’s talk about two other unconventional door designs that have been popularized by luxury and sport vehicles—scissor doors and gull-wing doors.
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Scissor Doors
The scissor door is probably the most common vertical door design that you’ll come across. People also refer to scissor doors as Lamborghini doors or simply “Lambo doors,” because they were initially popularized mainly by Lamborghini. Scissor doors rotate upwards from a single hinge, usually close to where the side mirrors would be. Scissor doors were originally designed to aid drivers with reversing—drivers could simply open the doors and lean out to see behind them. Doors that swing straight up also help conserve space in slim parking spots.
The vast majority of aftermarket vertical door hinge kits follow a scissor door design. You may encounter people mistakenly referring to vertical lambo doors or vertical scissor doors as “butterfly doors,” but they are not the same thing.
Gull Wing Doors
The gull-wing door design is very easily recognizable, most famously featured on Back to the Future’s DMC DeLorean, the Mercedes-Benz 300-SL, and the Tesla Model X
. Instead of rotating straight up like scissor doors, gull-wing doors rotate out from a horizontal hinge that connects the top of the door to the roof. Butterfly Doors
That brings us to butterfly doors. Butterfly doors are essentially a hybridization of scissor doors and gullwing doors. They don’t swing straight up, and they also don’t swing straight out—their A-pillar hinges are angled so that they’ll swing up and out. Imagining how butterfly wings fold above their body when they land can help you understand the motion that butterfly car doors are mimicking. The most famous examples of cars that use this design are the Alfa Romeo 33 Stradale, the Mercedes-Benz SLR McLaren, and the Toyota Sera.
Other alternative door designs you might encounter on luxury vehicles include suicide doors, which hinge at the back of the door, and swan doors, which are like butterfly doors with only a slight upward angle. There are also canopy door designs, where the top canopy lifts up from a hinge at the front of the windshield, and of course, sliding doors, featured most prominently on everyone's favorite minivans.
Can you add butterfly doors to a Dodge Charger?
Plenty of third-party companies offer aftermarket bolt-on kits, such as the Vertical Doors, Inc. Lambo Door Conversion Kits for Dodge Charger 2011 to 2022 models
. You’ll find vertical Lambo door hinge kits for all sorts of other Dodge vehicles, like the Dodge Challenger. They’re also available for other classic car models like the Chevrolet Camaro
, Chevrolet Corvette
, Chrysler 300
, and Ford Mustang
. You could even get them for a Hyundai if you really wanted! Vertical Lambo door kits will usually include mounting hardware that has been fitted to your Dodge Charger’s existing factory bolt pattern, as well as gas shocks. This equipment is designed to attach to your existing doors, although sometimes this modification requires you to remove your front fender first. Some kits are also offered as weld-on kits, which are a bit more risky of a modification than bolt-on ones. Vertical Doors, Inc. kits are considered some of the highest quality direct bolt-on door kits, made from domestic hardened steel, and they’re the most common brand you’ll see sold online for Dodge Chargers in the USA.
VDI door kits for Dodge Charger models are priced around $1,000 to $1,500 USD, but remember that you’ll either need to install them yourself or pay a professional to do it for you.
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