2015 Dodge Challenger SRT Hellcat - Jay Leno's Garage

that's pretty good welcome another episode of Jay Leno's Garage as you know we are huge Dodge and Chrysler enthusiasts here this is sort of a Chrysler room we've got my original challenger from 2008-2009 this is my 1970 challenger 426 Hemi car this is like the scariest car in the world when I was a kid 425 horsepower zero to 60 in six point four seconds now yeah it's not so much it's kind of like walking around with a rolled-up sock in your pants it looks good but it's not really that impressive this is impressive this is the new challenger hellcat 2015 707 horsepower making it the most powerful muscle car built in America one of those powerful cars anywhere in the world think about this car has more horsepower than the Lamborghini Aventador which costs what three hundred thousand dollars something like that does a quarter-mile about eleven three and it gets a lot better gas mileage tech gets about six months six miles seven miles per gallon I'm guessing this is somewhere I think you can eke out 20 if you don't have your foot in it all the time which you probably will anyway think about that 707 horsepower with air conditioning and everything this you couldn't get air conditioning and when you bought this new with the factory it came with a 90-day warranty three months that's it after that you're on your own pal so they have come an awful long way so to tell us a little bit more about this car let's meet the president and CEO of Dodge Tim Ken Disqus Tim come on in my remember Tim he was here with the a Barth and we did a little handbrake turn remember that take a look at that that was a lot of fun you've come a long way since the little Fiat that was a lot of fun a lot of people gave me some good hearted ribbing about that really okay you know car guys no horsepower cures all problems and 700 I wanted to be in that meeting when someone suggested why don't we make it with 707 horsepower was that a hard sell to the corporate guys no I'll tell you where that came from you know you know this better than anybody you got one of the original cars that we did in 2008 and a lot of the hardcore extreme enthusiasts said we love the car it's the most true to form muscle car we love to look we love everything about it it's a little bit bigger than the other cars in the class up a little bit bigger it's a little bit heavier we said you know we like that we like the fact that it's got a longer wheelbase we like the fact that it's got a functional rear seat and a big trunk but how do we overcome that performance disadvantage on handling braking and power-to-weight well we just went to our SRT engineers we said let's just get absolutely crazy with the horsepower yeah and shut everybody up well not that to them that was 700 that's what happened with this this was a little bigger than the Mustang a little bigger than the Camaro so consequently had the biggest production engine in America at the time and now this is the most powerful engine being produced in America is that I think the most most powerful muscle car you can buy it's also the fastest that you can buy we have it certified with drag radials at ten eight and totally bone-stock off the showroom floor floor 11 to 11 to 11 - Wow because I remember you know I come from the days where anything less than 14 was impressive I mean it's we're going to driving a little bit this one has the 8-speed automatic which is itself quite a breakthrough eight speeds but it also comes with a stick correct you can get a stick yes but I knew you're gonna want to stick we purposely brought an 8-speed yeah because I think this eight speed is gonna it's not going to change your mind but I think you're going to be impressed right this is I personally love sticks myself but this thing is unbelievable it will shift 160 milliseconds faster than any human can ship around and it'll Bank ears in race mode has three modes it'll bankers of race modes harder than this car ever did really well yeah this is not really you know it's just so funny because when I was a kid well look at even in the ad look at that ad besides the obvious sexist nature of the poacher wanted men who can handle a real car look it can't even stay on the road in its own commercial it's it's like sliding off the road near because that this is like this car was so considered so crazy fast back in the day but without of course anti-lock brakes had drum brakes at the back I mean it had nothing like this and actually they probably weigh pretty pretty much close to the same of it this this car was lighter so the power weight was different but 700 horsepower overcomes all right everything and you know I can save this you can only say it if you own one I owned one of the original ybody so I can say it rides like a stagecoach yeah in comparison to this if you don't own one those are fighting words but right right yeah I know I right I know what you mean but you know actually I had this out the other day and at high speed when that Hemi engine is breathing over 5,000 rpm that's when it really comes alive but this car is a compromise because you it's well besides eating I mean I I went up to Malibu or back you'd use the whole tank of gas like $90 to go 100 miles so it was pretty crazy where's this gets this will get 20 right this is the ultimate reincarnation of what we used to call the street and strip car right it's got a half inch full fuel line and it needs a lot of fuel to make 7or horsepower right this car will burn a gallon and a half of fuel a minute really a minute but if you want to take it to the drag strip and run tens all day it'll cruise home at 20 miles per gallon okay all right so it will get 20 miles per gallon at some point yep okay if you can drive it carefully well nobody can do that well it's pretty impressive you know the one thing I liked about when I might that matters car number 4 that is the fourth car off the production line and when I got it I was amazed at how well it handled I mean suspension everything was actually very very nice much better than I thought it was very European at the time but imagine has been a lot of updates yeah you're going to be real impressed with the way this handles and especially the way it breaks 4400 pound car with that much power we had to put big brakes on it so it's the biggest brake package we've ever put on a car 15.4 inch rotors in the front six piston Brembo calipers 4,400 pounds boy that's heavy isn't it yeah you won't notice it can we take a look under the hood whoo I read somewhere this supercharger gulps something like 30,000 liters of air every minute some crazy amount of it it it will suck all the air out of a 10 by 13 room in a minute that's how much air this thing sucks in our guy spent a lot of time though making sure you know this was a livable package for the long term anybody can supercharge an engine but you know it's all about the heat diodes up so they spend a lot of time making sure that it could exchange that heat and still run very strong and never degrade so don't start this car in a 10 by 13-inch room or you'll you'll you'll choke to death Wow a lot of air well it looks like they fit in well it's basically the same size Block in it it's just it's same size block completely different though about 90% of the parts have been changed from the sixth floor to the six - a lot of it to obviously make it stronger I mean the blocks got to be very strong the cranks got to be stronger the rods got to be stronger forged pistons even a new material on the head to make sure that I could withstand the boost pressures 11.6 pounds of boost in what is already a very large engine and it's still a high compression ratio nine and a half to one with the supercharger now you're sucking a lot of air so obviously now there's no more fog lamps so these are actually air intake so the whole front of the car was done for function you see that we got rid of all of the grille openings we had on the on the 71 the dual snorkel right just so we could get more air flow through here also for intake air we took out this light this feeds actually right into here so it's a cold air intake okay that's what guys used to do back in the 60s and dual headlight cars you just keep one headlight and run a an intake to the air right very cool I see this what happens when you let engineers run the company this is what I like for so many years American car companies had the kind of bean counters the accountants those kind of people now you have engineers doing stuff and this I I guarantee this car is going to be a huge hit I mean 707 horsepower what he's about 58 59 pounds we just announced pricing fifty nine nine that includes the gas guzzler tax okay so you'd have to go to like I said a little lamborghini aventador which is one of the hottest cars out there doesn't have this much horsepower that's pretty amazing it's not a new engine block color what is that kind of oh that's the original Hemi orange is that Hemi orange that's what it is yeah I guess it is looks a little more I guess it is Hemi orange alright very good you know we can go check that Hemi orange thing right now let's check it let's see if it's really Hemi orange it's close that's a me a little different a little lighter this is a 45 year old patina on the Hemi orange so that's the actual no but that's more that's more taupe orange color aside now those 20s in the front one of those 20 by 9 and a half Wow and what are the rears 20 as well 20 as well 275 tires Wow okay and I'm gonna tell you before we go on Drive yeah Pirelli PZero $300 each so that Abarth move that you pulled last time gonna be very expensive in this car yeah yeah I'll do anything on this one no no and obviously it's a full four seater car and it's got the TV screen the whole deal so when we go out and drive I'm going to show you it the car has our latest version of the performance pages you can literally customize this car for everything you want yeah for example if you want to set the transmission at the track in race mode I told you to ship it 160 milliseconds you can dial it back to sport you can dial it back to Street and its Street it'll shift just like a normal passenger car guy you can set it in three horsepower settings you want to go to a valet you can dial it back to 300 horsepower so the valet can't burn up your 600 I'll tell you first of all you never give your car to a valet when we go out to eat if there's the parking space in front honey we don't eat here so we go back to in-and-out burger where I can park my car and eat in the car that's what you do you don't give this to overlay you eat in the car she doesn't like it you stay home but that's another thing so if you let somebody borrow it you can dial it back to 300 horsepower you don't let anybody borrow this car under any I don't care how close a friend it is he is not really a friend he won to do a Burnout and do not let your friend anywhere near this guy these are hard to come by friends you can get those anywhere your friend wants to drive this get a new friend good and the other reason if the cars in the shop for an oil change you can set it back to 300 horsepower so the guy can't take it around the back of the building and burn your tires real car guys their own oil change thank you don't go down to those goofy lube or whatever it is no you don't let that guy anywhere near your car okay like I won't reason to dial it back for any real like I was saying that's a feature that we would disable in the car if we were giving it to you but some people somewhere along line may want have a useless feature I understand right or you can dial it up to 500 horsepower or you can dial it up to 707 horsepower I personally have never taken it off of anything but seven well let me ask you a question if if you want a triplets saying you dial it back to 300 osbahr is the mileage you don't pretty much the same all going to pen down your gas pedal oh it's all really just it's all self control same thing with the exhaust on the car yeah if you're into the gas and you got a load on the engine yeah it's straight through exhaust five and a half inches and it sounds like pure evil yeah if you're not on the gas nice quiet serene inside you can adjust the suspension the steering whatever you want you can turn this into three different cars now right from the screen with the standard shift model you get all those features too in terms of except for the shinji obviously but yeah everything else yeah yeah okay which do you prefer that this or the standard shift model every other car like this I take the standard this car this automatic this particular automatic I would take this one eight speeds eight speeds and I'm telling you you're gonna love the way this car shapes it must be a pretty beefy unit to get because I'm obviously the more gears you have the more speed you have the smaller the gears have to be it's actually larger than our typical HP whole new transmission oh it's oh it's not that's not okay it's the same design but it's much beefier much bigger okay I think it's time to go for a ride and not in valet mode let's start it up see what it sounds like good let's go find out some valets that's good smell has something to shift it with that the real key to this engine is what what are we today 91 degrees yeah they put a lot of time into making sure that they had the thermal management down the cooling is there the dual inner coolers with the heat exchangers they made sure that you could run this car on the track for 20 minutes without derating without pulling any worse Colorado Wow we tell people this is the muscle-car in the pony car segment yeah yeah it's the GT car it's the bigger usable right back see the full trunk the car you can drive every day you know I remember when when I got my Dodge Viper I'm everything you know Bob Lutz is a friend and he said it's got 400 horsepower you'll never see that again yeah give me one and then the GTS coupe came out is it's 450 horsepower they'll never be anything like or give me one of those so each year just gets better but I'm one of those people I really believe engineers will save the world and its really true you know they've managed to do amazing amazing things that make something that's this streetable with this much power I mean as I said the Hemi came with a 90-day warranty night that was it three months you're out of it I think the fact is you can go to the drag strip change the tires run tens which you know used to be a full-on race car and then drive home with the air-conditioning on the 18 speaker stereo playing and get 20 miles of the gallon I mean what more do you need it's amazing the Hellcat will be the new performance package for Dodge Hellcats the code name of the engine right we always code name every engine this one's stuck though cuz we like the name so much it was so fitting for the car right right you know even in race mode it's quite docile actually you want to go value for a dollar McLaren p1 is about a million two and does a quarter-mile in 97-98 it's about fifty nine thousand it does a quarter-mile with slicks in ten three that's a pretty good deal without you know I like a big American sedan of handles it's just so different than any other kind of cars around the world nobody else really makes this kind of car Mercedes did it once in the mid to late 60s with the 6.3 Mercedes that was a VA with 250 horsepower and that was the fastest most powerful sedan in the that was with the 250 even on track setting it rides very nicely it's amazing the difference you can make just by dialing and back them - now you're on Street mode you put the transmission in Street mode or the shift nice and soft and easy it'll up shits up shifts sooner instead of holding any higher just much more comfortable oh let's go back to track hop in the back I'll show you how this Performance Package works it's pretty cool a pretty comprehensive dashboard as you know you have your rear-view camera right there there you go and that's a wow that's a pretty good picture okay Tim was going to take us through the whole dashboard here okay so whatever god this is obviously our entertainment media 8.4 inch touchscreen biggest in this segment but what's really interesting about it is you can control everything from here we have some redundant controls but you can do your radio you can do your iPod you can do any media that you're streaming into the car you can do your controls for ventilation heated seats whatever you want the rest of your climate control your navigation you can pair your phone but the other really cool thing is the performance pages that are built to the SRT K this really allows you to not have to have two cars you don't need a track car and an everyday driver this car will literally do both and allow you to customize it hit the hot button right here right here with the timer says SRT mean okay it'll take you to the performance pages from here you can select track mode Street mode custom mode or default which is where it goes when you start out the car when you start up the car and immediately since you knows you have the red key in your pocket it immediately says he wants to full power so it goes into seven or Norse power and the softest settings okay what's really cool is you can go into a custom mode and you could say I want to set up this car the way I want to drive it I can put it in five hundred or seven under not sure why we even have that's probably for the lawyers because why would you put in anything seven hundred transmission you can go in street if you want to be driving back and forth to work and a shift early it'll shift soft it's real comfortable sport mode a little bit higher I can put it in track mode it'll shift it 160 milliseconds and it'll Bank shifts just like any old school muscle car I can't turn my paddles on and off I get by traction control a full track which will turn off my tractor-trailer sport which will give me a little bit or I can put it in street which will give me for rainy weather or things like that now when I'm in regulus limits let's have in sport here do I now have partial traction can you have partial traction control it'll still slip a little bit but not as much as it will with it off and then suspension I can obviously go on track sport or Street and what do you recommend for street driving sport and then about the best honestly the street gives you a great ride and it's still a very performance oriented suspension okay but you can ride it actually the track is very compliant as you saw you can write it in that all the time the other cool thing about the performance pages is that you can actually go in and you can set up the different applications that you can either put here or you can put into your seven-inch my oil temperature and everything else so you can you can have number one you can have your timers you can go zero to sixty quarter mile zero to one hundred eight mile braking distance whatever you want it will do it real time and we've tested it at a drag strip it is extremely accurate other than the rollout that you get in the lights of the direction so it's dead-on other than the rollout so usually very close to the time I can pick any gauges that I want oil temp oil pressure things you normally wouldn't see in a - coolant temp battery voltage trans temp some special things for a supercharger boost pressure air fuel ratio which people really like the air coolant temp and the intake temp real-time g-forces while you're driving and on anything that you see here anything you can slide over and put in the TFT any way you want it in here okay okay and then you can put it in engine mode and this will give you real-time horsepower and torque if you step on the gas you can see one of the great things though is to take the gauges yeah and then just move the gauges over like if if you want to know if it's a real hot day like today 91 degrees and you want to know what your air intake temperature is 174 degrees today that's pretty good considering a run at 12 pounds of boost and I send you 9 things I don't the way to get here with it I can slide it over to the 7 inch screen there okay and then I can have that in there and then I can put this back to radio mode and do it a room okay or have it been over there move it over there huh you got to actually do it okay you have to do it from here okay what I press okay let's say I want to move naffy so how I say vehicle and okay vehicle info then I can select Chloe pressures okay trans-time well - I usually keep it on tire pressure but a tire pressure let's see with it I just saw that one while the info there we go so with 37 37 38 okay all right let's take it for a ride most nicely what else being too old for men now $1.99 a $1.99 not limited at all it's all arrow Wow something very funny to me about full-size sedans that handle like sports cars it just makes me smile don't know why I know whether it's the fact it defies physics or whatever it is but there's something just satisfying about it because you know the old days you get there I used to drive some of the old 440 police cars boy those cold shake and you know things rattling where's this thing it's tight as a drum and it handles there's not a lot of body roll in it you know it's a nicely balanced car doesn't feel nose-heavy true like I said it's a heavy car but it doesn't it carries its weight all right is my impression of the parking valet parking here new challenger that's pretty good saying that's why you never give your car to a parking valet Tim thank you very much thanks - congratulations make it just another great American automobile imported from Detroit see you next week

Channel: Jay Leno's Garage

Views: 4,061,694

Rating: 4.9050097 out of 5

Keywords: Jay Leno, Jay Leno's Garage, car reviews, compares cars, classic cars, vintage cars, sports cars, super cars, cars, car gear, McLaren P1, Porsche 918 Spyder, Camaro Z28, 2015 Dodge Challenger SRT Hellcat

Id: MWMjR3r-nsI

Length: 23min 36sec (1416 seconds)

Published: Sun Aug 03 2014

Reddit Comments

[u/[deleted]]

You could tell the Dodge CEO was frustrated at Leno's comments about valet parking.

[u/archaeauto]

"700 horsepower overcomes... everything."

[u/Sameoo]

I might be an american car fan after this. I wanted a challenger because i love the way it looks, but it was too bulky. So i went with Japanese, But dat 707 HP. GOD DAMN

[u/iamnotseanclark]

I hate that Leno called it a sedan the whole time

[u/Fadic4]

ITT: people hating on jay Leno

[u/hokaythxbai]

I think the hellcat has made the front page of this subreddit more than any other car.

[u/[deleted]]

There's one thing the Challenger does better than any other coupe out there: rear headroom.

http://imgur.com/wpJcrrl

See that, automakers? The roofline doesn't have to be a smooth curve all the way back.

[u/AUTISTIC_PENIS]

"Upshits.."