The 2018 Dodge Demon Was Too Fast for Its Own Tires — Only 3,300 Buyers Got One

Dodge built the first production car ever certified to lift its front wheels at launch, then capped the run at just 3,300 units. This yellow 2018 Demon shows why collectors still won’t let go of the original now that the badge is gone for good.

Dodge built exactly one car that could lift its front wheels off the pavement at launch and have Guinness World Records show up to certify it. It wasn’t a supercar, and it wasn’t a one-off show build — it was a Challenger you could order from a dealer, drive home, and (carefully) drive back to your daily commute. The 2018 Dodge Challenger SRT Demon made 840 horsepower, ran the quarter-mile in 9.65 seconds, and did it all on a production line that only turned out 3,300 of them before Dodge shut the program down. A yellow example — the color fans still call “Twinkie” even though Dodge never used that name on a window sticker — is exactly the kind of Demon that collectors are chasing today, and it’s the star of a recent walkaround from Raiti’s Rides that treats the car less like a museum piece and more like the last of something Detroit will never build again.

What the Video Covers

Raiti’s Rides — the husband-and-wife channel known for straightforward walkarounds of rare and desirable American iron — spends its time with this particular Demon doing what the channel does best: pointing a camera at the details that made this car a legend instead of burying them in spec-sheet narration. The video lingers on the factory widebody fenders, the drag radials the Demon wore from the factory (a first for any production car), and the aggressive hood scoop that fed the supercharged 6.2-liter HEMI underneath. Commenters on the video zeroed in on the same things that made the Demon famous in 2018: the eye-catching yellow paint, the fact that Dodge doesn’t build anything like it anymore, and just how quick a “normal” production car this ferocious actually was.

Several viewers pointed out that this generation of Demon only ever came one way — no manual gearbox was offered, full stop. Dodge paired the supercharged HEMI exclusively with an 8-speed TorqueFlite automatic, a decision that irritated purists at the time but that engineers insisted was the only way to consistently put down 9-second passes without a human clutch foot in the way. That trade-off, more than anything else in the video’s comment section, is still what people argue about seven years later.

⚑ Featured Gear

Start Car Conversations →

As an Amazon Associate I earn from qualifying purchases.

The Demon’s History and Why It Still Matters

The Challenger SRT Demon arrived for the 2018 model year as Dodge’s answer to a question nobody had really asked: what happens if you build a drag-strip weapon that still has to be street legal and still has to fit a rear seat? The 6.2-liter supercharged HEMI V8 was rated at 808 horsepower on 91-octane pump gas, but with the optional Demon Crate — a dealer-installed kit that swapped in a race-fuel-only ECU, a set of narrow front wheels, and the tools to change them at the track — that number jumped to a factory-quoted 840 horsepower and 770 lb-ft of torque on 100-octane race fuel.

What made the Demon a genuine piece of automotive history wasn’t just the horsepower number. It was the way Dodge proved it. The NHRA certified the Demon’s 9.65-second quarter-mile pass at 140 mph, making it the quickest quarter-mile time ever recorded by a production car at the time of its launch. Separately, Guinness World Records certified something even stranger: a 2.92-foot wheelie off the line, the longest wheelie ever performed by a production car from a standing start. No factory car before it had been engineered specifically to get its front wheels off the ground — Dodge’s engineers had to work backward from that goal, moving weight rearward and tuning the suspension to do on purpose what would ruin most cars’ front-end geometry by accident.

Dodge built only 3,000 Demons for the U.S. market plus another 300 for Canada, a deliberately tiny run for a mainstream nameplate, and every single one was numbered. That scarcity is a big part of why prices on clean, low-mile Demons have only climbed since Dodge ended Challenger production in December 2023. The nameplate did get a spiritual successor in the 2023 Demon 170, but the original 2018 car remains the one that started the record chase — and, as more than one commenter under this video pointed out, some longtime fans still prefer the original’s proportions and its purer, angrier delivery to the newer car’s even bigger numbers.

What Makes This Demon Special

Beyond the record books, the Demon’s appeal comes down to how uncompromising Dodge was willing to be with a car wearing a Challenger badge. The factory-installed drag radials meant the car rode and handled unlike any other Challenger on the road — genuinely unpleasant in the rain, genuinely unbeatable at the strip. The widebody fenders weren’t cosmetic; they were there because the Demon needed room for wider rear rubber than any Challenger before it. Even the passenger seat was an option, not a given — buyers could delete it, along with the rear seat, to save weight, turning their street car into a factory-built two-seat drag racer with a title and plates.

Seven years on, the Demon has settled into the same category as the muscle cars it was chasing to outdo: a genuinely limited-production performance flagship that Detroit is unlikely to repeat now that the Challenger itself is gone. That’s the tension this walkaround captures without ever saying it outright — a car built purely to set records, now quietly becoming one itself.

Why Collectors Are Circling Low-Mile Demons Now

Every Demon left the factory with a numbered dash plaque, and buyers today track those numbers the way earlier generations of enthusiasts tracked Hemi Cuda fender tags. A well-documented, low-mile example with its original Demon Crate still in the trunk commands a real premium over a Demon that was driven hard, stripped of its crate, or repainted. Color matters too — brighter factory shades like the Yellow Jacket paint on the car in this video tend to draw more attention at auction than the more common black or Pitch Black examples, even though rarer colors weren’t necessarily built in smaller numbers.

Part of what’s driving the market is simple timing. Dodge ended Challenger production entirely in December 2023, closing out the model with the Demon 170 — a car that beat the original’s numbers on paper but never quite recreated the shock value of watching a factory-stock coupe lift its front wheels for the first time. That “first of its kind” status is not something Dodge, or anyone else, can replicate after the fact, and it’s the reason values on clean 2018 Demons have trended upward rather than settling the way most seven-year-old performance cars do.

Watch the full video above and let us know your thoughts in the comments.