Cat OR Hawk: 2018 Dodge Widebody Hellcat vs Jeep Trackhawk 1414 HP Review!

The Fast Lane Car pits the 707-horsepower Dodge Challenger Hellcat Widebody against the equally 707-horsepower Jeep Grand Cherokee Trackhawk — same supercharged Hemi, two completely different missions. One’s a widened muscle coupe built purely to put power down; the other’s an SUV that can still tow a boat and run an eleven-second quarter mile. Watch to see which one actually wins the buyer’s dilemma.

Stellantis, FCA at the time, built two vehicles around the exact same 707-horsepower supercharged Hemi and then more or less dared buyers to pick a lane. One is a two-door muscle coupe stretched wide enough to swallow a wider tire and a bigger ego. The other is a five-passenger SUV that can also tow a boat, and somehow also runs a mid-eleven-second quarter mile on the right day. The Fast Lane Car set out to answer the question buyers were actually asking in dealership parking lots: with identical horsepower on paper, does body style even matter anymore, or has raw power made the whole argument beside the point?

One Engine, Two Completely Different Missions

Both the Challenger Hellcat Widebody and the Grand Cherokee Trackhawk share the same supercharged 6.2-liter Hemi V8 producing 707 horsepower, which on paper should make this an easy comparison. What actually separates them is everything the engine bolts into — the Hellcat’s lightened, widened muscle car chassis built purely to put power to pavement, versus the Trackhawk’s taller, heavier SUV platform that has to manage the same power through an entirely different center of gravity and all-wheel-drive system. TFLcar’s framing of the two as Cat or Hawk gets at exactly that tension: identical output on the spec sheet, two opposite engineering problems left to solve underneath it.

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The Widebody Difference

Dodge’s decision to widen the Challenger Hellcat’s body wasn’t cosmetic — it’s a direct response to the same problem that shows up throughout this whole segment of the market: 707 horsepower easily overwhelms a standard-width rear tire’s contact patch the instant the driver gets aggressive with the throttle. The Widebody package adds significantly wider factory tires and revised suspension geometry specifically to convert more of that horsepower into forward motion rather than tire smoke. It’s the same engineering lesson that keeps surfacing across this entire era of high-horsepower Mopar products — power itself is comparatively cheap to make, putting it down cleanly is the actual, much harder challenge.

The Trackhawk’s Unlikely Case

On paper, an SUV beating or matching a dedicated muscle car sounds like a novelty stunt, but the Trackhawk’s all-wheel-drive system genuinely changes the underlying physics of a launch. Where the rear-wheel-drive Hellcat has to manage wheelspin off the line even with its widened tires, the Trackhawk can put power down through all four wheels simultaneously, often producing a more consistent, repeatable launch despite carrying significantly more curb weight than its Challenger sibling. That’s the counterintuitive detail TFLcar’s testing surfaces for viewers — raw horsepower parity alone doesn’t guarantee a straight-line win once drivetrain layout fully enters the equation.

Practicality as a Performance Metric

TFLcar built its which-would-you-buy framing around more than acceleration numbers, and the comments confirm that’s exactly how viewers actually approached the decision themselves. A recurring theme is buyers with families choosing the Trackhawk specifically because it still functions as a genuine daily driver and can carry car seats, while openly acknowledging the Hellcat holds the purer emotional appeal of the two. One commenter’s joke about needing any SUV and getting spousal approval specifically because it’s technically an SUV captures how many real buyers used the Trackhawk’s body style as a loophole into supercar-adjacent performance without the household argument.

What the Numbers Actually Say

Both vehicles run low-to-mid eleven-second quarter miles depending on conditions and driver skill, numbers that would have been drag-strip-only territory for any vehicle a decade earlier, let alone a three-row-capable family SUV riding on the same platform as a Grand Cherokee. The gap between them in a straight line ends up smaller than most viewers expect walking into this video, which is precisely the point TFLcar’s test makes — badge and body style create an assumption about performance hierarchy that the actual timing slips don’t fully support once both cars are strapped to the same track.

The Emotional Argument Nobody Can Data-Test

No matter how close the numbers land, TFLcar’s hosts and the comment section both acknowledge that this comparison was never purely rational to begin with. The Hellcat Widebody sounds, looks, and feels like a muscle car because it is one — flared fenders, a hood scoop, and a driving position that puts the driver directly behind that supercharged V8 with nothing softening the experience. The Trackhawk hides that same underlying emotional experience under a much more sensible-looking shell, and for a lot of buyers, that disguise is either the whole appeal or the whole problem with owning one.

Cat or Hawk, Years Later

Both vehicles have gone on to become genuine cult favorites within Mopar circles in the years since this video published, and this comparison holds up specifically because it never tried to force an artificial winner onto viewers. TFLcar’s real contribution here was proving that identical horsepower figures on a spec sheet can still produce two completely different ownership experiences day to day, and that the which-would-you-buy question was always going to come down to what buyers needed their 707 horsepower to also be able to do during the other fifty-one weeks of the year.

A Matchup That Won’t Happen Again

It’s also worth noting how short a window this specific matchup actually existed in. Both the Hellcat Widebody and the Trackhawk were eventually phased out as Stellantis shifted its performance lineup toward electrification, which means this video captures a genuinely finite moment — two 707-horsepower factory vehicles, sharing an engine family, sold new at the same time from the same corporate parent. That specific overlap is unlikely to happen again in quite the same way, and it’s part of why this comparison keeps getting rediscovered by newer viewers who missed the original window entirely.

The Pricing Twist Jeep Didn’t Have To Make

Pricing tells its own part of the story too. When new, the Trackhawk actually carried a lower starting price than the Widebody Hellcat despite offering more usable interior space and all-wheel-drive traction, a detail that further undercuts the assumption that the muscle car should automatically be the more serious performance buy. TFLcar’s hosts return to that point directly, noting that Jeep essentially undercut its own sister brand on value while matching it almost exactly on power, which is precisely the kind of internal competition a shared parent company usually tries to avoid.

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