Dodge Challenger Hellcat V8 Could Be More Powerful than V10 Viper

 

                    

By Jeff Perez

Next year, we’ll be lucky enough to see an updated Challenger come from the Dodge lineup. After all, the current Challenger has been in the lineup for about seven years without any major changes. But one big change that we’ll see with this refreshed Challenger is the introduction of an all-new engine– and it ain’t no wimpy V6. It’s a HEMI — and it’s called “Hellcat.”

 

What Hellcat is, in short, is a new 6.2-liter HEMI V8. But expanding on the premise of an all-new HEMI, is the likelihood that it will come with somewhere in the market of 640-horsepower. That’s more powerful than the SRT Viper, in case you forget.

“We may have a situation — where the flagship car is not the most powerful car in our arsenal,” Ralph Gilles said in a recent interview with Hot Rod Magazine. “So we have an internal horsepower race as well as an external one.”

The Challenger SRT with the new Hellcat engine would probably target cars like the Ford Mustang Boss 302 and Chevrolet Camaro Z/28. That means it will have close to the same price tag at somewhere around $75,000.

For reference, the Viper has a 640 horsepower V10 and starts at just under $100,000. If all goes according to plan, the Hellcat will have as much– if not more power than the $100K Viper. We’d call that a steal.