The $100,000 Jeep Trackhawk Is the Most Powerful SUV Ever

Doug DeMuro reviews the 2018 Jeep Grand Cherokee Trackhawk, a factory SUV packing the same 707-horsepower supercharged Hemi found in Dodge’s Hellcat muscle cars. See how a badge-engineered Grand Cherokee became, for a moment, the most powerful SUV money could buy.

Doug DeMuro built a career finding the quirks and oddities buried in cars most reviewers rush past. With the Trackhawk, he barely had to look, because underneath the badge-engineered Grand Cherokee body sits an engine nobody in 2018 expected Jeep to actually build.

The Engine That Does Not Belong in a Jeep, on Paper

The Trackhawk’s defining feature is its engine, not its badge, a supercharged 6.2-liter Hemi V8 shared directly with the Dodge Charger and Challenger Hellcat, producing 707 horsepower in a body that, underneath the styling, is still a Jeep Grand Cherokee. That is the detail DeMuro’s title leans on, most powerful SUV ever is not hyperbole, it is a literal spec-sheet claim, since no other SUV on sale at the time matched that output, and the Trackhawk borrowed almost the entire drivetrain from Dodge’s most extreme muscle cars rather than engineering something SUV-specific from scratch.

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The Car Came From Another YouTube Channel

The description credits a channel called DHR Streetspeed for providing the car featured in the review, a detail worth noting because it shows how much of DeMuro’s catalog by this point in his career depended on a network of car owners and other creators willing to hand over genuinely rare or extreme vehicles for a day of filming. That kind of borrowed-car model let DeMuro cover cars far outside what a single person could realistically own or access.

Why the DougScore Format Mattered to Viewers

DeMuro’s reviews built their reputation partly on a consistent rating format he called the DougScore, a public spreadsheet, linked directly in this video’s description, scoring every car he tested across categories like Fun Factor, Practicality, Comfort, and Value. That structure let viewers compare the Trackhawk directly against everything else he had reviewed, rather than relying on a purely subjective impression, and it is part of why his channel became a reference point for enthusiasts trying to make sense of an SUV that behaved, on paper, more like a muscle car.

The Comment Section’s Favorite Running Jokes

DeMuro’s specific verbal habits became a running joke in the replies almost as much as the car itself. Multiple commenters point out how many times he says the model name in a way that reads as an accidental pun throughout the review, and another jokes that unlocking all the Trackhawk’s features after 500 miles feels like a video game achievement, a nod to DeMuro’s habit of walking through every hidden menu and easter egg a car has to offer, a format he pioneered and that much of the car review genre later copied.

A Detail That Aged Into Its Own Follow-Up Story

One later comment references a completely separate story, a wrecked Trackhawk rebuild documented by a well-known YouTube restoration channel, showing how this review kept resurfacing years after upload as new Trackhawk-related content drew viewers back to DeMuro’s original breakdown of what the car actually is under the styling. It is a pattern common across DeMuro’s catalog, a review holds up well enough that unrelated Trackhawk content elsewhere on the platform keeps sending traffic back to it.

Why $90,000 Felt Both Expensive and Cheap at Once

DeMuro calls the roughly $90,000 as-tested price too much for his own budget in the video, a line multiple commenters turned into a running joke by pointing out he went on to buy far pricier cars, including a Ford GT, not long after. The joke aside, the price comparison is a real part of the car’s appeal, at the time nothing else on the market delivered 707 horsepower and a factory warranty for anywhere close to $90,000, let alone in a three-row-capable SUV body.

The Review That Helped Define a New SUV Category

The Trackhawk arrived at the start of a wave of genuinely fast SUVs that followed it, a trend the comments reference directly, joking about a certain Italian supercar maker’s own answer to the segment. DeMuro’s review captured the Trackhawk near the start of that shift, treating a 707-horsepower Grand Cherokee less as a novelty and more as a real preview of where the performance SUV segment was headed, which is a big part of why the video still gets watched years after its original upload.

How the Trackhawk’s Platform Made the Swap Possible

Cramming a supercharged 6.2-liter V8 into an SUV built on the same platform as the Dodge Durango was not a simple engine swap, it required reinforced motor mounts, upgraded brakes borrowed from the Hellcat parts bin, and an all-wheel-drive system reworked to handle far more power than the Grand Cherokee platform was ever originally designed around. Jeep engineers essentially treated the SUV’s unibody structure as a starting point rather than a limitation, which is a big part of why DeMuro’s review spends real time on the chassis and drivetrain changes rather than treating the Trackhawk as simply a Hellcat engine dropped into a taller body.

The Legacy the Trackhawk Left Behind

By the time Jeep discontinued the Trackhawk in 2021, it had helped normalize the idea of a genuinely quick, three-row-capable performance SUV across the industry, a segment that has only grown more crowded since, with rivals from multiple luxury and performance brands chasing the same formula. Reviews like this one, capturing the car early in that shift, function as a kind of baseline, proof of what the segment looked like before every manufacturer felt obligated to field their own answer to it.

How the Trackhawk Compared to Its Direct Rivals at Launch

When the Trackhawk launched, its closest factory rival for outright power was arguably the Mercedes-AMG GLE63 S, which produced meaningfully less horsepower from a smaller twin-turbo V8 despite a significantly higher starting price. That gap in both output and cost is a big part of why DeMuro frames the roughly $90,000 price as a relative bargain even while calling it more than he personally wanted to spend, the Trackhawk was, by the numbers, doing more for less than almost anything else in its class at the time, which is exactly the kind of value argument his reviews were built around making clear to viewers.

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