2016 Dodge Charger SRT Hellcat Long Term Update 6: Kill All Tires Edition

A four-door sedan with 707 horsepower, rear-wheel drive, and a factory Line Lock function is not going to be gentle on consumables, and a year in a long-term test fleet proved it. The 2016 Charger SRT Hellcat ran 11-second quarter miles, claimed a 204 mph top speed, and destroyed rear tires as a matter of routine. Read on for what the supercharged 6.2-liter actually costs to live with and why these cars have started climbing in value.

Some long-term test cars come back with a worn driver’s seat bolster and a note about cupholder ergonomics. Others come back on the truck. When a manufacturer hands over a four-door family sedan with 707 horsepower routed exclusively to the rear axle and then leaves it in a magazine’s garage for a year, the outcome is not really in question. What is genuinely interesting is what happens after the novelty burns off, once the staff has stopped filming launches and the odometer keeps climbing anyway. That is when a car either becomes a chore or becomes the one everybody quietly fights over on Friday afternoon.

707 Horsepower in a Four-Door Sedan

The 2016 Charger SRT Hellcat used a supercharged 6.2-liter HEMI V8 producing 707 horsepower and 650 lb-ft of torque, sent through an eight-speed TorqueFlite automatic to the rear wheels only. There was no manual option on the Charger and no all-wheel drive, which meant every one of those 707 horsepower had to find traction through two contact patches on a car weighing roughly 4,575 pounds. Dodge marketed it as the most powerful production sedan in the world and the claim was accurate at launch. It was also, for a while, the only four-door car on sale that could genuinely embarrass a supercar in a straight line.

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The Supercharger and the Cooling It Needed

The engine’s 2.4-liter twin-screw IHI supercharger ran about 11.6 psi of boost and drew enough parasitic power on its own to run a decent economy car. Supporting it required a forged steel crankshaft, powder-forged connecting rods, heat-treated aluminum alloy pistons, and a low-temperature charge air cooling circuit with its own radiator and pump. The intake system pulled air through the driver’s-side headlamp position, which Dodge left open specifically as a cold-air duct, one of those solutions that sounds like a hack and turns out to be a genuinely effective piece of packaging.

Two Keys, Two Very Different Cars

The two-key system remains one of the better ideas anyone has had in this segment. The black fob limits output to roughly 500 horsepower, with softer throttle mapping, higher shift firmness settings disabled, and traction control tuned conservatively. The red fob unlocks the full 707. In practice the black key is what you hand a valet, and it is also what you use in rain, because 500 horsepower through the rear wheels of a heavy sedan on a wet road is already an ambitious proposition. The distinction is not marketing. The two settings feel like different cars.

The Tire Problem Nobody Solved

Tires were the recurring theme of the entire test, and there was no fix. The car came on 275/40ZR20 Pirelli P Zero rubber, a good performance tire that was simply outmatched by the drivetrain. Any meaningful throttle application in first or second gear overwhelms the rear axle, and the car’s Line Lock feature, which holds the front brakes so the rear tires can be heated, effectively institutionalizes tire destruction as a factory function. A rear set can be finished in a few thousand miles of enthusiastic driving, and a replacement pair runs well into four figures. Owners learn to budget for it.

What Consumables Actually Cost

The rest of the running costs follow the same logic. The Hellcat requires premium fuel, carries a gas guzzler tax, and posts an EPA rating in the mid-teens combined that most owners never see. Brake pads and rotors wear at a rate consistent with the mass and the speeds involved. Insurance is its own conversation. None of this is a criticism of the car so much as an accurate description of what 707 horsepower costs to keep on the road, and the Charger’s genuine achievement is that everything else about ownership, from the trunk space to the touchscreen, remained completely ordinary.

Straight-Line Numbers and a 204 MPH Claim

The performance figures explain why people tolerated all of it. Zero to 60 mph took roughly 3.6 seconds on a good surface, the quarter mile came in around 11.0 seconds at about 125 mph on the factory tires, and Dodge claimed a top speed of 204 mph, verified at a proving ground. A four-door sedan with rear seats and a usable trunk running 200-plus mph was, and largely remains, an absurd proposition. The Charger reached those numbers without any of the aerodynamic aids or exotic materials that competitors used to get there, purely on displacement, boost, and gearing.

How It Behaved When Nobody Was Filming

Away from the drag strip the car was more civilized than its reputation suggests. In its softest drive mode the adaptive damping settles into a genuinely comfortable long-distance cruiser, the eight-speed shifts imperceptibly, and the supercharger whine drops far enough into the background that conversation is easy. That duality is the whole reason these cars accumulated real mileage in long-term fleets rather than sitting under covers. It could commute. The problem, as every test of every Hellcat eventually notes, is that the throttle pedal is always right there, and restraint is a finite resource.

Living With 8 MPG Weeks

Fuel economy in hard use is worth stating plainly because it shapes ownership. Weeks involving repeated launches and any track time produce single-digit mpg without much effort, and the 18.5-gallon tank empties correspondingly fast. Highway cruising at legal speeds returns something closer to the low twenties, since the eight-speed’s tall top gears drop engine speed considerably. The gap between those two figures is enormous, and it means a Hellcat’s running cost is almost entirely a function of driver discipline rather than the car itself.

Why the Charger Hellcat Became a Collector Car

The Charger Hellcat has since become a genuine collector proposition, which few would have predicted for a mass-market sedan. Production of the Charger in this form ended after 2023, taking the supercharged HEMI four-door with it, and the finality of that has done what finality always does to values. Low-mileage cars, unusual color and option combinations, and the later widebody and Redeye variants have all firmed up. The ordinary early cars like this 2016 remain the accessible entry point, and they are the ones that got driven, which is arguably the more honest way to own one.

Tell us in the comments how long a set of rear tires would last you.

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