Richard Hammond Tried to Commute in a 707-HP Dodge Charger Hellcat – Here’s What Actually Happened

Richard Hammond spent a day daily-driving DriveTribe’s 707-horsepower Dodge Charger Hellcat, and by the end, the car built for chaos had quietly won him over. Here’s what the specs, the sound, and his own reaction reveal about America’s most unhinged family sedan.

A 707-horsepower muscle sedan sounds like a terrible commuter car — until someone actually tries to drive one to work every day. That’s exactly what happened when the DriveTribe team handed the keys of their supercharged Dodge Charger Hellcat to Richard Hammond and sent him out to commute on ordinary roads with a genuinely absurd amount of horsepower along for the ride. The car itself is a study in contradictions: four doors, a back seat, cupholders, and a 6.2-liter supercharged HEMI V8 capable of putting 707 horses through the rear wheels. Owners and onlookers who’ve encountered Hellcats around the world keep circling back to one detail — the sound, a supercharger whine layered over a thundering V8 that turns a routine drive into an event. What happened when Hammond actually spent real time behind the wheel, rather than hammering it for a five-minute clip, says more about the Hellcat than any spec sheet ever could.

DriveTribe Hands Richard Hammond the Keys

DriveTribe, the car-culture channel Hammond built alongside Jeremy Clarkson and James May after their Top Gear days, added a Dodge Charger Hellcat to its stable of test cars, and one video followed a simple premise: let the boss actually live with it for a commute rather than just thrash it for a review segment. The pitch, according to the video’s own description, was that a 707-horsepower, supercharged 6.2-liter HEMI monster made for a fittingly ridiculous way to get from home to the office. It’s a format that suits Hammond well — he’s built a reputation for reviews that let a car’s personality show up over time instead of just in a single dramatic pull.

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What makes the video worth watching isn’t a single flashy moment but the slow-burn reaction. Commenters who’ve followed Hammond’s reviews for years note that this is one of the rare Hellcat drives where the presenter never buries the throttle in the first few minutes, and that restraint ends up being the point — the car wins him over gradually rather than through a single burnout. That’s a very different story than most Hellcat content, which tends to open and close with tire smoke, and it fits the video’s actual premise: this was supposed to be a commute, not a track day.

The Nine-Year Reign of the World’s Most Powerful Family Sedan

The Charger SRT Hellcat launched for the 2015 model year, and it did something genuinely strange in the muscle car world: it put supercar-level output into a practical four-door sedan with a trunk and a full back seat. The formula centered on a 6.2-liter supercharged HEMI V8 producing 707 horsepower, enough to send the Hellcat Widebody from 0-60 mph in about 3.6 seconds and through the quarter-mile in roughly 10.96 seconds, with a top speed around 196 mph — figures that put a family car in the same conversation as far more exotic machinery.

Dodge kept building on the formula for years, eventually adding a 797-horsepower Redeye variant for buyers who wanted even more, before confirming that 2023 would be the final model year for the supercharged Hellcat engine as emissions regulations and the shift toward electrification closed in. That nine-year run cemented the Charger Hellcat as one of the last unapologetic expressions of Detroit’s horsepower wars — a car built with almost no compromise for subtlety, sold at dealerships next to minivans.

For anyone shopping the used market now that production has ended, the spread between trims matters. A standard Hellcat, a widebody model with its flared fenders and wider tires, and the 797-horsepower Redeye all carry meaningfully different price tags and different personalities behind the wheel, even though they share the same basic supercharged architecture. With the Hellcat engine no longer in production, values on clean, low-mileage examples have generally held up better than typical Detroit sedans of the same age — a sign of how much of a moment this car represented before it disappeared.

Sound, Size, and a Supercharger Whine You Can’t Un-Hear

Talk to anyone who’s spent time around a Hellcat and the conversation tends to land on the same two things: how the car sounds, and how big it looks to people outside the United States. The supercharger’s whine cutting through the HEMI’s rumble has become the engine’s signature, instantly recognizable even to people who’ve never sat behind the wheel. Owners who’ve driven Hellcats through Europe describe strangers rolling down windows at stoplights just to hear it, or asking what kind of car it is because the badges are easy to miss on a dark paint job.

Size is the other constant. In the U.S., a Charger reads as a normal-sized sedan; parked on a narrow street in Kyoto or Stockholm, it looks comically oversized, which is part of why it draws stares wherever it travels outside American roads. That contrast — a car that’s unremarkable in scale at home and enormous everywhere else — is part of what makes it such a distinctly American object.

The engineering that makes daily-driving one of these plausible at all is easy to overlook next to the horsepower figure. And it is not cylinder deactivation doing the work: unlike the 5.7- and 6.4-liter HEMIs, the supercharged 6.2 never got Multi-Displacement System hardware at all, so all eight cylinders are firing every second the engine is running. What actually civilizes it is the eight-speed automatic’s tall overdrive gearing, adaptive dampers that go soft outside of Sport mode, and Dodge’s two-key trick — hand a valet the black fob and the car caps itself at around 500 horsepower, which is still more than most people will ever use getting to work. It’s not a fuel-efficient engine by any real measure — the EPA rates the Charger Hellcat around 13 mpg city and 22 mpg highway — but those quiet compromises are what let a car this extreme also serve as somebody’s actual commuter, which is exactly the premise this video set out to test. Combine that with the fact that a notoriously hard-to-impress British reviewer came away saying he could learn to like it, and the Hellcat’s case for itself gets harder to argue with, even for people who’d normally reach for something smaller and sharper.