A narrow-body 2022 Dodge Challenger SRT Hellcat Redeye is a reminder of exactly what Dodge walked away from in December 2023: 797 horsepower, a supercharged Hemi V8, and a nameplate that outlasted every other pony car built on the same 2008 blueprint. Here’s what this generation’s final chapter actually drove and sounded like — and why fans still haven’t let go.
Dodge built its last gas-powered Challenger in December 2023, and the internet has been in mourning ever since. Scroll the comments under almost any Challenger review today and the same refrain shows up again and again: “gonna miss these cars,” “my dream car,” “least we got to experience the Hemi.” This 2022 SRT Hellcat Redeye, a narrow-body model packing 797 horsepower from a supercharged 6.2-liter Hemi V8, is a good reminder of exactly what’s being mourned. It looks almost identical to the Challenger Dodge introduced back in 2008, because underneath the badges, the intercooler scoops, and the wider fenders on some trims, it basically is. The reviewer walking through this one calls the supercharger’s whine his favorite part of the whole experience, and by the time he finishes the walkaround, it’s obvious why cars like this still pull “dream car” comments years after Dodge pulled the plug.
This particular Redeye is the narrow-body version, meaning no fender flares and no extra rubber, just the standard Challenger silhouette with the sunken front grille and headlight cutouts that route extra air toward the brakes and intercooler. The reviewer, running the channel Bros FOURR Speed, walks through the exterior first: the front splitter, the character line running the length of the doors into those oval taillights, and a cloth-and-plastic interior that seats three across in the back, genuinely roomy for a two-door coupe built around a supercharged V8 up front. He also notes the Challenger’s dashboard and tech layout carried over largely unchanged for years, which some buyers count as a downside next to newer rivals and others count as proof Dodge spent its money on the engine instead of chasing screen size.
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On the drive, he’s candid that the ride firms up considerably in Sport or Track mode, calling it a bit rough and bumpy, exactly what you’d expect from a car built to put 707 lb-ft of torque down through the rear tires. In normal driving, though, he notes it settles into something genuinely usable as a daily driver, with the supercharger staying quiet in the background until you decide it shouldn’t. At roughly two and a quarter tons, the Redeye isn’t a small car, but he’s clear that it carries the weight well, right up until you ask the Hellcat engine to do what it was built for.
Under the Hood: What the Redeye Actually Delivers
Under the hood is Dodge’s highest-output version of the supercharged 6.2-liter Hemi V8 short of the limited-run Demon and the 807-horsepower Super Stock, rated at 797 horsepower and 707 lb-ft of torque, paired exclusively with an 8-speed automatic transmission. Dodge’s own performance figures put the widebody version of this car at 3.5 seconds to 60 mph and a 10.8-second quarter mile when new, numbers that, in 2022, undercut cars costing twice as much money. The narrow-body Redeye featured in this review trades a fraction of that widebody grip for a lighter, more classically proportioned Challenger stance, which is exactly the trade several commenters under the video say they’d make every time given the choice. More than one viewer specifically calls out preferring the narrow body’s proportions over the widebody’s flared fenders, a genuine split among Hellcat buyers that shaped how Dodge kept both versions in the lineup right up to the end.
A Nameplate Dodge Built for 15 Years, Then Walked Away From
The third-generation Challenger arrived for the 2008 model year, reviving a name Dodge had last used on its E-body pony car of the early 1970s. What started as a modest lineup built around a V6 and a 5.7-liter Hemi grew, over a decade and a half, into one of the widest performance ranges any single nameplate has offered, from the base SXT up through the 707-horsepower Hellcat introduced for 2015 and this 797-horsepower Redeye trim, added for the 2019 model year. Along the way, the Challenger became the last car standing from Detroit’s original pony car wars still built on essentially the same formula: a V8 up front, rear-wheel drive, an independent rear suspension that made it the most livable of the bunch, and a body style barely disguised across fifteen model years. For a deeper look at how that original pony car rivalry played out under a different badge, our piece on the 1969 AMC Javelin’s underdog run against Detroit’s Big Three covers the same era this Challenger’s shape still borrows from.
Dodge ended production of the gas-powered Challenger and its Charger sibling in December 2023, closing out the run with a series of “Last Call” special editions before shifting both nameplates toward an electrified future built on a new platform. That timing is a big part of why comment sections like the one under this video read the way they do: less like a routine car review and more like a eulogy for the last naturally dramatic, supercharged V8 muscle car Dodge is likely to build for a long while.
What Makes the Redeye Different
What separates the Redeye from the standard Hellcat isn’t just the horsepower number, it’s the way Dodge tuned the entire experience around that number. The supercharger note the reviewer keeps coming back to is deliberate; SRT’s engineers spent real effort making sure a Hellcat announces itself before you ever see it coming. Combine that with the driving-mode split, genuinely comfortable and quiet in Auto, noticeably stiffer in Sport or Track, and you get a car that’s just as happy idling out of a grocery store parking lot as it is running down a quarter-mile.
It’s also, based on the comments under this exact video, a car people are already nostalgic for even though plenty of them are still on the road. One viewer summed it up simply: “Least we got to experience the Hemi that our parents and grandparents talked about.” With the nameplate gone and Dodge’s newest Charger now built around a twin-turbo inline-six instead of a V8, reviews like this one are becoming less “should I buy this” content and more of a historical record, a last honest look at what a factory-built, 797-horsepower American coupe actually drove like before the badge went quiet. For buyers shopping the used market now, that history is starting to show up in asking prices too, as low-mileage Redeyes increasingly get treated less like a used performance car and more like the last chapter of a fifteen-year story.
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