Walk the floor of any car show and you'll find the future neatly organized according to buzzwords. Autonomous. Electric. Connected. Shared. The folks at Dodge, though, use fancy another buzzword. More. As in more power. More torque. And more wheelies.
Yeah. More wheelies.
Dodge, a company with scant interest in subtlety, topped even its own absurdity with the 2018 Dodge Challenger SRT Demon. Put aside the searing color, the enormous scoop, and the fact this thing runs on equal parts testosterone and gasoline, and revel in the lunacy of 840 horsepower.
Think about that for a moment. For the relatively bargain-basement price of, well, Dodge hasn't said yet, you get a 'Murican-made muscle car with 40 horsepower more than the most powerful Ferrari ever. This thing will do the quarter in 9.65 seconds and hit 60 mph in 2.3 seconds. Those are supercar numbers.
Nuttier still, this thing does wheelies. Slam on the gas and you'll go 2.92 feet with the front wheels airborne. No, really. Dodge invited the Guinness World Records people to see it, and they showed up with a tape measure. Turns out that's a world record for production cars.
Few people can handle that kind of insanity, of course, which is why everyone who buys a Demon spends a day at the Bob Bondurant School of High-Performance Driving, where Vin Diesel will ride shotgun shouting, "I live my life a quarter mile at a time!" (OK, that last part is a joke. But you can see it happening.)
No word yet on just how many Demons Dodge plans to build, but given that it had to double its production run of the 707-horsepower Challenger and Charger Hellcat models, you can bet it'll sell every single one of them. Because who doesn't want more wheelies? That's a future anyone can get behind.
