2015 Dodge Challenger SRT Hellcat: 707 Horsepower and More Orders Than Brampton Could Build

On July 27, 2015, Dodge did something carmakers seldom put in a press release. It told customers that remaining scheduled 2015 SRT Hellcat orders would still be built at Brampton Assembly, but that all unscheduled 2015 model-year Hellcat sold orders would be cancelled. Buyers whose verified orders had not been built were offered discounted 2016 pricing if they ordered again. Tim Kuniskis, president and chief executive of the Dodge and SRT brands, put the fix in one sentence: "We are more than doubling our SRT Hellcat production for 2016." Ten months after orders opened, Dodge's 707-hp flagship had outrun the factory that built it.^1,2

The Hellcat arrived on top of a car that was already selling. When Dodge priced the 2015 line on July 16, 2014, Kuniskis said the Challenger had "been on a tear," setting an all-time sales record in 2013, its fifth year on sale. For 2015 Dodge gave it a 1971-inspired exterior and interior, and made the TorqueFlite eight-speed automatic available across the range, standard on the SXT, SXT Plus and R/T Plus and optional on the others. The same release called the new Challenger the most powerful and fastest muscle car ever. Those are Dodge's words and Dodge's definition of the category, and they arrived with a stopwatch attached.^3,4

The price ladder had seven rungs, and it made the Hellcat look less like a halo than the top of a staircase. Before $995 destination, the SXT started at $26,995 with the 305-hp Pentastar V-6, then came the SXT Plus at $29,995, the R/T at $31,495 and the R/T Plus at $34,495, both with the 5.7-liter HEMI rated at 375 hp with the manual or 372 with the automatic. The R/T Scat Pack, at $38,495 with a manual including a $1,000 gas-guzzler tax, and the SRT 392 at $45,995 both used the 485-hp 6.4-liter HEMI; they shared an engine but not a trim or its equipment. The SRT Hellcat started at $59,995, gas-guzzler tax included.^3,4,5

For that money the buyer got what Dodge called the first factory-built supercharged HEMI: a 6.2-liter V-8 rated at 707 hp and 650 lb-ft, with a six-speed manual as standard and the TorqueFlite eight-speed as the alternative. It also came with two key fobs, a first in Chrysler Group history. The black fob limited the engine's output and the red one unlocked all of it; the pricing release does not put a number on the black key's limit. In the vehicle identification number, a Hellcat reads DZC in positions five through seven and 9 in position eight for the supercharged 6.2, which is how a buyer today tells the real car from a badge.^2,3,5,6

Dodge backed the horsepower with timeslips it arranged itself. In November 2014 the company announced an NHRA-certified quarter mile of 11.2 seconds at 125 mph on the car's street tires, and 10.8 seconds at 126 mph on drag radials. Those are manufacturer tests under stated conditions, not a magazine's measurement of a customer car, and they belong to the cars that ran them. The same release gave the EPA highway estimate as 22 mpg with the automatic and 21 with the manual, a reminder that the red key's fuel bill depended entirely on the driver's right foot.²

Orders came faster than cars. Dodge said it took more than 4,500 Hellcat orders in the first five days after the order books opened in September 2014, and by November 13 cars were leaving Brampton for dealers. That figure is a lower bound, since Dodge said "more than," and it is a count of orders, not of cars built. The July cancellation proves the point: some of those orders never became 2015 cars at all. FCA published no model-year production total for the 2015 Challenger and no count of Hellcats built, and "more than doubling" for 2016 cannot be turned into a number without the base it doubles.^2,1

Dodge's fix for 2016 was a rationing system. The 2016 order bank opened in the second week of August 2015, with production starting in September, and allocation was split into two cycles, August 2015 and February 2016, based on each dealer's past Dodge sales and on how quickly its Hellcats had left the lot. Each cycle carried half of the allocation. Both 2016 Hellcats kept the 707 hp and 650 lb-ft ratings and gained standard Laguna leather and the Uconnect 8.4AN system with navigation.¹

The whole Challenger line rode the same wave. FCA's December 2015 sales report put calendar-2015 Challenger sales in the United States at 66,365, against 51,611 for 2014, and called it the car's best sales year ever and its seventh straight year of growth. A year later FCA restated 2015 as 66,377, and that restated figure is the one it measured against when it called 2018's 66,716 a new record. Both 2015 figures cover every Challenger sold in the calendar year, V-6 to Hellcat, and include whatever model years were on the lots, so neither can stand in for 2015 model-year production or a Hellcat count.^7,8,9

The year's rarest Challengers were not street cars at all. On July 23, 2015, at the Mopar Block Party during the Mopar Mile-High NHRA Nationals, Mopar opened orders for a race-only Challenger Drag Pak limited to 60 cars: 35 with a supercharged 354-cubic-inch HEMI and 25 with a naturally aspirated 426. The prices, $109,354 and $99,426, repeated the displacements in their last digits. Mopar chief Pietro Gorlier said sportsman racers had been winning with factory package cars for years: "Now, we're supercharging their ranks." FCA Canada later reported that dealers had ordered all 60.^10,11

The Drag Pak count shows why a plan, an order and a finished car are three different numbers. The NHRA's 2020 technical profile records 58 Drag Paks built in 2015, two short of the 60 ordered, and does not say why or how the count was compiled, or how the 58 divide between supercharged and naturally aspirated engines. The NHRA describes bare Brampton bodies completed under Mopar and SRT engineering direction. They are not street-legal Challengers and belong in no street production or sales figure. For 2015 the Challenger stands at the extremes: a 707-hp car that a buyer could order but not always get, and a 58-car race program priced above $99,000.^12,11,10