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When Fiat Chrysler finally attached a price tag to the Durango SRT, the 475-horsepower, 12.9-second-quarter-mile three-row SUV suddenly looked less like an expensive halo vehicle and more like a genuine bargain. Executive Tim Kuniskis called it America’s fastest SUV, and the numbers backed up the claim in ways few family haulers had ever matched. Read on to find out exactly what the sticker included, and how Dodge justified putting Hellcat-adjacent performance into a school-run vehicle.
A custom shop barely a year and a half old rolled four vehicles onto the SEMA 2016 floor, including a Plymouth ‘Cuda wearing a full carbon-fiber body built from parts customers could actually buy. That wasn’t the only rule getting rewritten that year — Dodge introduced the first all-wheel-drive American muscle car, and one shop found a way to add twin turbochargers on top of an already-supercharged Hellcat engine. Read on to find out how far builders were willing to push the muscle car formula.
Before a single Demon rolled off the line, FCA Powertrain engineers set themselves an internal goal that sounded impossible in 2015: a 9-second quarter mile with the front wheels lifting off the ground. Dodge revived a forgotten badge last used on a 1970s compact to carry that mission, and eventually delivered on every part of the promise. Read on to find out how close the finished Demon actually came to that original engineering target.
For five years the Shelby GT500 nameplate sat dormant while rivals kept shipping ever-more-powerful factory monsters. Then camouflaged prototypes started turning up at Virginia International Raceway wearing a roll cage and a leaked oil spec sheet that hinted at serious horsepower. Read on to find out what those spy photos gave away, and how the finished car compared to the speculation.
This 1978 Dodge D150 Warlock traded work-truck practicality for gold pinstripes, real oak bed rails, and bucket seats, part of Dodge’s factory-customized ‘Adult Toys’ lineup aimed at buyers who wanted a pickup with attitude. Few of these survive in good condition today. Read on to find out what made the Warlock different from every other truck on the lot.
Dodge built a real consequence into the Demon’s production line: sell at MSRP and your customer’s car rolls off early with a coveted low serial number, mark it up and you go to the back of the queue. One Florida dealer tested that system anyway, and the story spread fast. Read on to find out whether Dodge’s serial-number leverage actually worked.
David Freiburger and Mike Finnegan head to a Colorado junkyard with roots back to 1959 and walk straight into a genuine rescue project: a 1969 Ford Mustang Mach 1 that had been sinking into the same spot since around 1980. Thirty-seven years of neglect usually means a car is done for good — this one had other plans. The team’s approach to getting it running again is classic Roadkill. Watch how far a nearly-forgotten Mach 1 can go.
Drag racing legend Don Garlits personally introduces the HellScat, a one-of-a-kind Dodge Challenger engineered past 1,000 horsepower and built specifically to be given away for charity. The name mashes up two existing Dodge trims, but the build goes well beyond anything either one offered from the factory. See why a figure as credible as Garlits was the right person to tell this car’s story.
Chrysler’s Imperial spent 1969 through 1973 as the longest postwar personal luxury car short of a limousine, and it hid some genuinely strange engineering under all that sheet metal, including the first four-wheel anti-lock braking system offered on an American car and a vinyl roof that mysteriously faded into a purple paisley pattern. The G4 Imperial is far more interesting than its sales figures suggest.
A friend’s Dodge 440-powered pickup, affectionately nicknamed the smiley truck, gets driven hard enough on a rough road that something underneath finally lets go — live, on camera, with a passenger along for the ride. Viewers have spent years debating exactly what failed, with rusty U-bolts and worn mounting hardware the leading theories. It’s raw, unscripted, and exactly the kind of big-block Mopar mishap owners swap stories about.
A Ford GT40 — the car built specifically to humiliate Ferrari at Le Mans — lines up against a modern 707-horsepower Dodge Hellcat on an Illinois airstrip in this 1320video matchup from Omega Motorsport’s NoFlyZone Midwest. Sixty years of engineering separate these two cars, but only a quarter-mile separates them on the pavement. Watch to see which era comes out ahead.
A Plum Crazy Challenger Hellcat with a folded front end and barely 9,000 miles on the odometer looks like pure waste. It is not. Wrecked Hellcats are routinely parted rather than crushed, because the supercharged engine, transmission, and driveline are worth more separated than the shell is worth whole. The paint code, oddly, is the part that will be hardest to replace. Here is what happens to a car like this next.
Everyone associates the Dodge Viper with its brutal V-10 engine, but TFLcar’s Viper Week dig into the car’s origin uncovers a detail that surprises even longtime Mopar fans: the very first Viper concept wasn’t built around a V-10 at all. The name almost went a different direction too. This origin story traces exactly how a stripped-down concept car became one of America’s most uncompromising sports cars.
A Cummins-powered diesel truck runs a legitimate 9.18 seconds at 147.46 mph at a Pinks All Out event at Summit Motorsports Park in Norwalk, Ohio, numbers that would embarrass plenty of sports cars. The uploader even had to clarify it was a full quarter-mile pass after skeptical commenters assumed it was the shorter eighth-mile. Viewers in the comments cannot decide whether to be impressed or defensive about a truck running these numbers. Watch the launch and see why fifteen to twenty psi of boost changes everything.
Dodge spent twelve separate teaser videos building up to the Challenger SRT Demon, and this installment hinted at something no factory muscle car had claimed before: a car sold with its own crate of drag strip tools. The Demon arrived with drag radials, a transbrake, and a horsepower figure that required a trip to the race gas pump. Read on to find out how far Dodge actually went to back up the “dual purpose” claim.