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One April 2018 news cycle delivered three very different performance bets at once: a turbocharged four-cylinder Camaro finally earning a 1LE badge, a BMW M2 Competition borrowing its engine from the M3/M4, and a Buick electric SUV concept promising supercar-quick acceleration. None of these would have made sense as performance news a decade earlier.
The 2017 New York Auto Show leaned hard into SUVs, from a new Lincoln Navigator to a 707-horsepower Jeep Trackhawk. But buried in the same lineup was Dodge’s answer to the utility-vehicle takeover: an 840-horsepower Challenger SRT Demon. Here’s how the show’s biggest trend and its loudest outlier ended up sharing a floor.
In 2016, the muscle car market was shrinking almost everywhere except one corner of it – Hellcat sales climbed nearly 70 percent while overall Challenger and Charger volumes both fell. The family SUV mentioned almost in passing in this piece would eventually get the same supercharged treatment, at a price tag nobody saw coming back then.
A 5,300-pound SUV hitting 60 mph in the time it takes to read this sentence sounds like a typo, but Patrick Rall’s in-car footage of a 2018 Jeep Grand Cherokee Trackhawk running its Launch Control system proves the number is real. Two runs, two nearly identical times, and a supercharged engine borrowed straight from a Hellcat explain how a family hauler ended up embarrassing sports cars at stoplights.