The American Muscle Car is as ingrained in our society as the Fourth of July, baseball and the Kardashians. Countless films and television shows have centered around the power and prestige that comes with being considered an American Classic. Dodge has long held their position as Muscle Car making machines, even after a couple of flops. Now, with their Dodge Challenger SRT Demon, they probably go down in history as the greatest American Muscle Car producer ever.
What makes a legendary American Muscle Car you may ask? Well you have to be loud, proud, fast and affordable. The Demon comes standard with a V8, 840-horsepower engine and it’s $100,000 price tag. So it has the loud proud and fast parts down, but just misses the mark on affordability. However, once you pop the hood of this--no pun intended--bad boy, you’ll understand why the Dodge Challenger SRT Demon should go down in history as the sickest American Muscle Car ever made.
Power, Precision, Price
You’ve never felt real power until you’ve started up the Demon’s 840 horsepower engine; or 808 without pumping in the 100-octane race fuel and reflashing the ECU for optimizing the engine for fuel. If that’s not enough to get your heart pumping, the 770ft of torch supported by street-legal racing tires and an option for only the driver’s seat, should. This is essentially the entire Fast and Furious franchise in car form. Never have we seen a car with such sheer power. If you own one of the mere 3,300 units made, then you can rest assured that you have purchased a piece of American Car history.
Blowing the Competition out of the Water
From a standing position, it takes 2.3 seconds from the Demon to go 0-60--2.1 if you have a rolling start. Going 30mph takes one total second, that's what BBC Top Gear calls, "satanic". They also reference how this means that the Demon is faster than Bugatti Chiron and Tesla P100D while being only rear-wheel drive--the latter two are all wheel.
So when Doug Demuro of Autotrader--who had a rare chance to get behind the wheel of this car, and test it-- calls the Demon “the most-powerful production-car ever”, he's right. Not only does its 0-60 speed back this up, the fact that it’s quicker in the quarter mile than a Porsche 918 Spyder, and that it has more V8 power than a McLaren P1, also cements the Demon's status as best American Muscle Car ever made . In my opinion, we haven’t blown our European competitors this far out of the water since Ford took on Ferrari at Le Mans in 1964.
Dodge may have shut down production on the Demon after producing only 3,300 units, but it’s hellish spirit tries to live on in its counterpart, the Challenger SRT Hellcat Redeye. Which with just 797-horsepower, just misses the sheer power of the Demon. However, the real difference between the two shows when you dig deeper into their respective engines. The Demon's engine has 25 compartment upgrades as compared to the Hellcat including but not limited to, a new bigger supercharger, pistons, rods, valve train and fuel injection system.