Dodge Killed the Hellcat V8 in 2023 — Stellantis Just Confirmed It’s Coming Back With More Than 700 Horsepower

Dodge spent two years insisting the V8 muscle car era was over, replacing the Charger’s supercharged HEMI with a battery pack and then a turbocharged six-cylinder. Weak EV sales and comments from Dodge’s own CEO have changed that story: a supercharged 6.2-liter Hellcat V8 making more than 700 horsepower is reportedly locked in for the Charger’s 2028 refresh. Here’s what’s confirmed, what’s still rumor, and why the wait might be worth it.

Dodge told everyone the party was over. The supercharged 6.2-liter HEMI V8 that powered the Hellcat and Redeye Chargers was dead after 2023, killed off by emissions rules and a corporate pivot to electricity. The next Charger would be a battery-powered Daytona, full stop. Fans howled, comment sections filled with betrayal, and a YouTube video from Raiti’s Rides promising “the ONLY Hemi V8 muscle car” for 2027 racked up over 126,000 views from people desperate for the engine to come back. Here’s the twist: when viewers actually watched the video, plenty of them were furious to discover the car on screen didn’t have a V8 in it at all. That reaction alone tells you everything about where the Charger story stands right now — and why the real answer is stranger and more encouraging than the clickbait suggests.

Because buried under the disappointment is a genuinely wild turnaround. Stellantis spent two years insisting the gas-powered V8 muscle car was finished. Now the company’s own leadership is talking about bringing it back, and the timeline for when that actually happens is the thing every Charger shopper needs to understand before signing a deal sheet.

From V8 to Volts: How the Charger Lost Its Muscle in the First Place

The seventh-generation Charger that launched for 2024 was unlike anything Dodge had built before: an electric-only “Charger Daytona,” complete with a synthetic exhaust note piped through speakers to fake the sound of a combustion engine. It was Dodge’s answer to tightening emissions and fuel-economy rules that had already made the old supercharged Hellcat V8 expensive to keep in production. The last gas Hellcat Charger rolled off the line in 2023, and for a while, that really did look like the end.

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The problem was that buyers didn’t show up. Dodge sold 7,421 Charger Daytona EVs in the U.S. through all of 2025, but the back half of the year told the real story: once the federal EV tax credit disappeared, quarterly sales cratered to just 346 units. That collapse continued into 2026, with only 534 electric Chargers delivered in the first six months of the year — an 88% drop from the same period in 2025. Whatever Dodge hoped the Daytona would prove about the future of muscle cars, the market answered back almost immediately.

The Hurricane Six Was Supposed to Be Enough

Dodge’s actual fix arrived under the hood, not in the battery pack. The gas-powered Charger Sixpack brought back a combustion option in the form of Stellantis’s twin-turbo “Hurricane” inline-six, tuned to two output levels: a standard 420 horsepower and 468 lb-ft in the Charger R/T, and a high-output 550 horsepower and 531 lb-ft in the Scat Pack, both paired with an 8-speed automatic and all-wheel drive. On paper, the Hurricane six beats the numbers of the old naturally aspirated 5.7 and 6.4 HEMI V8s outright, and it did the job of luring buyers back to showrooms — gas-powered Charger sales reportedly surged 404% even as the Daytona EV kept collapsing.

But horsepower charts don’t capture what a lot of longtime Mopar fans actually wanted, which is the specific theater of a supercharged HEMI: the whine, the shove, the sense that the car might be a little bit dangerous. That’s the gap the comment section under the Raiti’s Rides video was reacting to — disappointment that a car wearing Hellcat-adjacent hype still wasn’t making that sound. One commenter put it bluntly, saying they’d never clicked faster on a video and felt clickbaited when there was no V8 under the hood; another compared the switch to a beloved brand quietly swapping out its original recipe and hoping nobody noticed.

Why “Hellcat or Nothing” Is More Than a Slogan

Here’s where the story actually gets confirmed rather than rumored. According to reporting that cites Stellantis’s own Investor Day materials, the supercharged 6.2-liter HEMI V8 Hellcat is officially coming back to the Charger lineup, reportedly producing more than 700 horsepower. Dodge CEO Tim Kuniskis has reportedly said that if a V8 returns to the Charger, it has to be the Hellcat — there’s little point building in room for an engine that gets outrun by the brand’s own turbocharged six. The most consistent target in industry reporting is the 2028 model year, timed to the Charger’s first mid-cycle refresh, which makes the “2027” framing floating around some enthusiast videos closer to a hopeful rumor than a locked date. Nothing about final horsepower, pricing, or trim names has been made official.

There’s already physical proof Dodge has the hardware ready to go. In late 2025, the brand built exactly 50 examples of a race-only “Charger Hustle Stuff Drag Pak” for NHRA-sanctioned drag racing, each fitted with a 354-cubic-inch (5.8-liter) Gen III HEMI V8 built around a forged crank and rods and topped with a Whipple 3.0-liter twin-screw supercharger — priced at roughly $235,000 apiece and legal only at the track. It’s not the same engine as the rumored street Hellcat, but it proves the platform can swallow a big supercharged V8 without a full redesign, and it’s the clearest signal yet that Dodge engineers have been quietly keeping the door open the whole time.

What a Returning Hellcat Would Actually Need to Deliver

If Dodge really does bring the Hellcat name back to the Charger around 2028, it’s going to be measured against a moving target. The old 717-horsepower Hellcat recipe was class-leading when it launched, but Stellantis has already pushed updated Hellcat hardware further elsewhere — the 2027 Ram TRX is expected to land around 777 horsepower using a newer version of the same supercharged architecture. If that same upgraded hardware makes its way into the Charger, buyers could be looking at a HEMI V8 muscle sedan more powerful than any Hellcat that’s ever worn the badge, built into a heavier seventh-generation body that will need every bit of that torque to feel as unhinged as its predecessor.

There’s also a business logic underneath all of this that goes beyond nostalgia. High-horsepower halo models are low-volume but high-margin, and the Ram TRX already proved that buyers will pay six-figure money for bragging rights and tire smoke. A Hellcat-badged Charger gives Dodge a genuine flagship to point to while the Hurricane six and the struggling Daytona EV handle the rest of the lineup — and it gives fans who felt betrayed by the 2023 shutdown a real reason to believe the V8 muscle car isn’t actually finished.

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