Doug DeMuro puts the 2018 Jeep Grand Cherokee Trackhawk through his signature deep-dive review, tackling the SUV that borrowed its supercharged Hellcat V8 straight from the Dodge Challenger. At roughly $100,000, it claimed the title of the most powerful SUV ever made. Doug breaks down whether the price tag, the quirks, and the absurd power actually add up. See how it scores on the DougScore.
An SUV that can embarrass sports cars off a stoplight sounds like a marketing exaggeration until you’re the one sitting in the passenger seat when it happens. Doug DeMuro built his entire channel around finding the quirks and features that make cars weird, wonderful, or both, and the 2018 Jeep Grand Cherokee Trackhawk gave him plenty of both to work with. Under a body that looks like any other Grand Cherokee sits an engine that has no business being there — and that contradiction is exactly the point. What Doug found when he dug into the details explains why this SUV earned a reputation nothing else in its class can touch.
The Most Powerful SUV Ever Made
The Trackhawk’s claim to fame is simple to state and hard to overstate: at the time of this review, it stood as the most powerful SUV ever put into production. Jeep achieved that by borrowing the supercharged 6.2-liter Hemi V8 from the Dodge Challenger and Charger Hellcat models and dropping it into a Grand Cherokee body, resulting in a family SUV that could out-accelerate cars costing twice as much.
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A Six-Figure Price Tag Explained
At roughly $100,000 as tested, the Trackhawk sits well above a typical Grand Cherokee’s price range, and Doug’s review digs into exactly what that premium buys — from the drivetrain hardware needed to handle Hellcat-level power in a heavier, all-wheel-drive package, to the badging, brakes, and interior trim that separate it from lesser Grand Cherokees. It’s a review built around answering the obvious question: is a six-figure SUV actually worth it?
DeMuro’s Signature Deep Dive
True to the channel’s format, the review doesn’t stop at straight-line performance. Doug walks through the Trackhawk’s quirks and features — the details most reviewers skip past — while also scoring the car through his own DougScore system across categories like fun factor, value, and practicality. It’s the kind of exhaustive, detail-obsessed review that turned his channel into a reference point for people cross-shopping unusual, high-performance vehicles.
Why an SUV With This Much Power Matters
The Trackhawk represents a broader shift in the performance world, where manufacturers started proving that outrageous horsepower numbers didn’t have to live exclusively in two-door sports cars. Putting Hellcat power into a practical, all-weather family SUV changed what buyers could reasonably expect from a vehicle that also needs to haul groceries and carry car seats, and it opened the door for a wave of high-performance SUVs that followed in its wake.
A Review Worth Revisiting
Years after this review first went up, the Trackhawk remains a touchstone in conversations about performance SUVs, and Doug’s breakdown of what makes it tick still holds up as one of the more thorough looks at the car. With views numbering in the millions, it’s clear this wasn’t just a niche curiosity — it was a genuine cultural moment in the SUV world, and this review is a big part of why people still talk about it.
How the Trackhawk Changed Buyer Expectations
Before the Trackhawk, buyers looking for genuine supercar-level acceleration in a daily-usable package had few options outside of exotic all-wheel-drive sedans costing considerably more. Jeep’s decision to drop Hellcat power into a mainstream SUV platform forced competitors to respond, kicking off an arms race among manufacturers to build ever more powerful high-performance SUVs — a trend that arguably wouldn’t have accelerated as quickly without the Trackhawk proving there was real demand for it. That shift also reshaped how enthusiasts talk about SUVs altogether, moving the conversation away from towing capacity and cargo space and toward quarter-mile times and top speed, a framing that would have sounded absurd for a family hauler just a few years earlier.
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