The $100,000 Dodge Demon Is the Craziest Muscle Car Ever

this is the 2018 Dodge Challenger SRT demon better known simply as the Dodge demon and it is the most insane car on sale today if for no other reason than this the Dodge Challenger lineup now spans from a base model you can rent from Enterprise for like forty nine ninety five a day all the way to this which has eight hundred and forty horsepower yes that's right eight hundred and forty horsepower and the crazy doesn't stop there this car was specifically built for drag racing and I'll get into all the cool drag stuff in a minute but for now just listen to these numbers the Bugatti Veyron runs the quarter mile in 10.1 seconds the McLaren 720's does the quarter-mile in nine point nine seconds the laferrari and the Porsche 918 Spyder do the quarter-mile in nine point eight seconds this thing will do a quarter-mile in nine point six five seconds it's faster than a la Ferrari and then we have the zero to 60 times the demons official zero to 60 time is 2.3 seconds but in the right mode with the right settings the little rollout the demon can do 0 to 60 and as low as 2.1 seconds which makes it the quickest production car in history in history the Porsche 918 Spyder has all-wheel drive and a dual motor hybrid system with plug-in capabilities made into a technologically advanced v8 put inside a flowing sculpted body for aerodynamics and this giant Holt of dodge is quicker the demon weighs 650 pounds more than a 918 spyder it's still quicker the demon costs a million dollars less than a 918 spyder it's still quicker anyway I could go on for a while talking about this stuff but it's better just to show it to you so today I'm going to show you around the demon and I'm going to show you all of its interesting quirks and features and then I'm gonna interview the car's owner to find out what would possess someone to buy the demon then I'm gonna take it out on the road which I'm already a little bit nervous about and then I'm going to give it a dug score and for more of my thoughts on the daemon click the link below to visit autotrader.com slash oversteer where I've also compiled a list of the weirdest dodge models currently listed for sale on auto trader you may also want to check out the link below to kelley blue book calm as this car is going into the kelley blue book long-term test fleet and the cars costs and ownership experiences will be documented for the first year of its life I'm gonna start upfront with the demons hood scoop and indeed this isn't just any hood scoop instead this is the single largest hood scoop in any production car now when you open up the hood you can see that dodge calls it the air grabber which is sort of a retro term it was an air intake system they used to use during the muscle-car era and indeed it is an air grabber this thing during a quarter-mile run dodge says it ingests enough air to fill the lungs of 800 humans and since we're under the hood time to cover a few quirks with the engine starting with the fact that at a maximum of 840 horsepower this car has the most power of any production v8 ever in history there are a lot of other cool things under here too for example how about the fact that this little demon logo is cast on to the engine itself there's no plastic covering this thing instead there's this cool demon logo which is just awesome and then there's the SRT power chiller which is kind of a stupid name but it's for a really cool thing if you're having the drag strip you'll know that your car starts to get hot after you make drag strip run after drag strip runs so a lot of guys they come and they put ice packs on their engine their intake to cool it down well the SRT power chiller uses the air conditioning refrigerant to cool the engine it's basically a built-in ice pack for your engine when you're in drag mode the demon is also the first production car designed to run on race gas yes that's right you can fill this thing up with 100 octane fuel and that is its optimal setting in fact I said before the car has a maximum of eight hundred and forty horsepower well if you're running on a regular 91 93 octane premium swell the kind of crap your car runs on it only puts out eight hundred and eight horsepower not until you stick in race gas can it possibly do the 840 but it's not that simple you can't just put in race gas instead you have to put in the race gas that and have your ECU reflashed to run the full eight hundred and forty horsepower and when you do that something interesting happens on the inside pacifically every demon comes with two sets of Center interior buttons that normal buttons and the ones you can use if you want to run race gas when you reflash your computer to run at max power you also the second set of buttons which includes a button to switch to race gas mode for when you want to do crazy drag strip runs and unlock the demons full performance potential install around front this car also has another trick up here speak lies for headlights right and not quite the two inner ones are actually dummies they're fake they look like headlights but really their air intakes designed to suck even more air into the engine of this thing now the little circle that rings them is actually an LED light that lights up but stick your hand in there the actual hole is a hole it's an air intake that would be less powerful plebian challenger hellcat with only 707 horsepower it has one dummy air intake in the headlights but this car I guess it was deemed it simply needed more air so instead it has two another cool thing about those air intakes look inside them and you'll notice there is a little demon logo in there no one will ever see that no one will ever notice it but they put it in there for the few that do and that is pretty cool also interesting in the front of this car is the front lip spoiler which is absolutely gigantic take a look at this thing it's huge you could store stuff on this thing it's massive and it's unique to the demon so it's one way that you can tell this car apart on the outside from the regular challenger models next up we got to talk tires now this car is intended for drag racing and so it comes with drag slicks that are just barely street-legal they're basically drag slick tires so they have little grooves in them for the most minimal amount of rain these tires are specifically designed for this car and so if you look on them they actually have the demon logo printed on the outside of the tire which is super cool also on the tires is the treadwear rating which shows how long they'll last the industry standard is 100 and many new cars are 200 or 250 this thing is zero you will never again see a treadwear rating of zero a couple of other interesting things about the demon's tires because these are basically street-legal drag slicks when you buy the demon you have to sign a waiver acknowledging that you know you're not really supposed to use the tires or the car in wet weather you're not supposed to use it when it's below 15 degrees out and they don't recommend that you use it on the highway because these tires are so grippy that highway we'll start to wear them faster than a traditional tire and since we're talking about drag stuff we might as well talk about one of the coolest things and that is the fact that when you have it in drag mode on 840 horsepower mode with everything set right and you floored at the drag strip this car will actually lift off the ground the front end will come up a couple of inches and for a few feet going down the drag strip the front end will lift off the ground all that weight is transferred to the back so the car can push off the line faster in fact this car is so fast or that 9.65 second quarter mile time that it is technically illegal for NHRA drag racing if you're running under ten seconds you're supposed to have a roll cage and so this car built for crazy drag racing is too fast to really go drag racing unless you mount a roll cage in it instead what you'll have to do if you want to take this drag racing is just sort of let off at the very end to ensure that you get like a ten point one or a ten point two and you don't break the NHRA rules what's so cool or the demons flared fenders look at these things in order to accommodate the drag racing tires they flared out the fenders like two inches and it gives the demon a mean menacing look you can't get on any other challenger except the Hellcat wide-body another cool quirk on the outside of the demon that would be the windshield no much health itself is fairly normal but take a look at the bottom corner of the windshield over on the driver's side you will see a little demon doing a burnout like if it was in the burnout box at a drag strip and even as the fender flares so you can be sure it's a demon and not some lesser challenger now that's a cool looking thing but it's also functional Chrysler has been putting these little windshield graphics in the windshields of a lot of its models especially the Jeep Wrangler and other jeeps and I've been told that owners are far more likely to replace their windshields with a factory windshield then go through the automaker's parts department instead of going to an aftermarket cheaper windshield just because it has this graphic so putting that graphic in actually makes Chrysler a little extra money if your windshield breaks another cool exterior feature of this car is the black treatment over the hood the roof and the trunk now that's an option you can get the car in one color or you can just get the black treatment on the hood or you can get it in all three places I like the fact that it's in all three places though because no other our model offers that except for the TA and the TA has a different hood so if you have it in all three places and you see the hood you can easily distinguish this car as a demon which is important because interesting fact this car doesn't say demon anywhere on it not even the back it just says SRT of course you'd kind of have to be an idiot to look at this car not realize you were seeing a demon because there are a lot of ways to distinguish it from every other challenger there is of course the demonic badges on the front fenders there the giant fender flares there's the black treatment over the top of the car if the owner got it there are the drag slicks there's the hood scoop but if you're still a little confused well maybe you can hear it rev let's take a listen now when you climb inside the diamond one of the first things you'll see and get excited about are the gauges which are super cool they're these old-school retro muscle car gauges and they just look awesome they're not unique to the demon they're in some other challenger models but I just love how they look a couple of other interesting quirks inside the demon the passenger side climate control vent says demon on it and not only that it shows which number demon you have which is kind of a cool little touch additionally the SRT logo in the middle of the steering wheel lights up at night which is something I've never really seen in any other car before but it makes it feel kind of cool and special I'm also happy to report that the demons interior has really been dressed up from the standard Challenger the seats are really nice though these nice heavily bolstered sports seats but they also feel like they have nice soft leather the materials are just nicer the stitching is better the door panels look nicer but then again all that had better be true considering this cars price point then again with that said you don't get a lot of stuff in this car there's no adaptive cruise control lane departure warning forward collision warning all those modern safety features are taken out in fact you don't even get a power passenger seat it's all controlled manually which is crazy in a car this expensive and it gets even crazier than that you could order it with just a manual driver's seat and no passengers see the theory is if you're a crazy drag strip person and you just want to save weight you just order the driver's seat and who cares about the passenger it's not like you're gonna be running with one anyway and then I'll improve your drag time by just that many milliseconds now if you do choose to get this car without a passenger seat that little waiver I was telling you about earlier with the tires that comes back into play you also must sign on that waiver that if you get this car without a passenger seat you will never try to install a passenger seat and you will never put anyone in the passenger seat because they will not be adequately protected in a crash basically if you get this car with no passenger seat it's gonna have no passenger seat forever it won't even come with a seat belt and you're sort of making that commitment needless to say virtually no one who's ordering these things is actually getting it without a passenger seat but then again those waivers you sign say a lot of things one of them is that you promise never to use the racetrack or drag strip features on the road hahaha so what exactly are those racetrack and drag strip features well let's take a look in the infotainment system there's some crazy stuff in here now I'm going to start in the infotainment system with the SRT app now I covered a lot of the SRT features in my Jeep Grand Cherokee track Hawk review which I'll link in the description below in this one I'm just gonna focus on most of the stuff that's unique to the demon starting with drag mode take a look at this you click on drag mode and it goes through this whole checklist of things that it does in order to get this car ready for a drag race which is just so cool and the craziest part is if you have the air conditioning all the way up and you put it in drag mode you can feel that the air conditioning has been optimized for drag use in other words it's been greatly diminished inside the cabin and the AC refrigerant is being used to cool the engine another cool feature in the SRT app unique to the demon that would be race cooldown mode now you're in drag mode you're doing drag runs and your engine starts to get hot it will circulate that AC refrigerant to cool down the engine but that's not all put it in race cooldown mode leave it running and it will do a much better job cooling down your engine than it would if you've just turned off the car now of course a lot of cars will cool down their engines if you leave them idling after a racetrack run or a drag strip run but I've never before seen a car with a specific mode designed to cool down the engine even faster than a normal car after you use it on the track and this might be a good time to talk about the keys now when you buy this car its delivered with three keys to are red and one is black now the two red keys give you access to the full complement of horsepower 808 or 840 if you do that ECU flash the black key well that restrains the car to a mere 500 horsepower what a crazy vehicle this must be for the restrained version to have only 500 horsepower next we move on to the launch control now it's not all that unusual that this car has launch control but the unusual thing is that this car has launch control disabled until you reach the first 500 miles after you cross the 500 mile threshold then you can use it there's some electronic function that tells the car that you've hit 500 and then you can start to use launch control maybe even crazier than that launch control has a variable rpm so you can launch this car from all the way up to 3,000 rpm if you want or you can dial it down to a lower rpm depending on what you think the optimal launch is also cool with that launch control the little icon that shows what RPM you're setting is actually the little red slashes in the Dodge logo that is a clever little detail another cool feature is a factory line lock system which lets you engage the front brakes without the rear brakes drag racers like to use this for burnouts and better starts like I said you can see most of the rest of the SRT and performance pages items in my Jeep track hawk review which is linked in the description below with that said going through these features I found a little surprise in the bests section which shows you your best 0 to 60 time quarter-mile time whatever since you bought the car or since you last reset it the owner of this car has not yet been to the drag strip although he's done some spirited runs up highway on-ramps and this car shows a best quarter-mile time of 12 ax7 now that wasn't intentional he just kind of did an acceleration run up a highway on-ramp then let off the accelerator pedal and joined traffic and yet he still ran a 12-7 you can see the trap speed is 75 s probably the traffic speed that he was going by the end of the quarter mile in fact he didn't even know that he had set a best time until I was sitting in the car with him going through all of the different features and functions and we saw his best quarter-mile time in there and he was rather surprised to see that it's kind of hilarious now beyond the infotainment screen there is a screen in the middle of the gauge cluster that also has a couple of cool features in it for example if you go to the tire pressure section you get to see all the tire pressures individually and the car displayed is a challenger which is a kind of neat little trick additionally if you go down to the gauges that show you all sorts of performance stuff they're these old-time gauges which I find kind of funny here we are scrolling through old-time lookin gauges except they're an electronic LCD screen in the middle of actual gauges it's kind of funny those gauges show way more stuff than virtually every other car for instance you can look at your intercooler coolant temperature which is something that well almost nobody really cares about I also like that in this center screen among the performance tab and the tire pressure tab one of the tabs is fuel economy that will be the least looked at tab in the entire history of automotive screen design another interesting feature controlled through the infotainment system that would be the mirror remember we all had little levers on our mirrors you push it and then it's on the dimmer mode well not anymore now you press dimmer in the infotainment system and it turns on and off the automatic dimming interior rearview mirror another thing I like about the radio you see that little favorite button in the upper right well you push that when one of your favorite songs is playing on the radio and that lets the radio know that it is indeed one of your favorite songs then you're driving along one day listening to the music and then that favorite song is on a different radio station it pops up a little graphic letting you know that a song you previously selected as one of your favorites is playing on a different radio station so that you can switch to that station and listen to one of your favorite songs and that is a pretty cool idea another thing I like about the daemon it doesn't have just a crappy plastic steering wheel like a lot of cars and doesn't even have a leather wrap steering wheel this one is wrapped in Alcantara and stitched it looks really good now most Alcantara wheels aren't heated but this one is you can heat this wheel press a little heat button then eventually it comes on and it warms your hands but with all the interesting quirks and the cool features and all the cool modifications and the poor power we also have to talk about one other important demon trade and that would be pricing the demon starts at 86 thousand dollars with shipping and compare that to a bass challenger bass challenger starts at 28,000 dollars meaning this thing is more than three times more expensive than a bass challenger it's got to be the biggest spread in the entire car industry it's also a huge horsepower spread the bass challengers at 305 and this thing is at 840 now the sticker price of this particular demon is just over 92 thousand dollars it has virtually every option except for the expensive sunroof but with dealer markups and collectability it's unlikely that any of these things are really gonna trade hands for less than $100,000 and in terms of pricing that's also another interesting quirk and feature because well I haven't discussed the accessories yet I'm gonna start with the demon crate that's right the demon crate which is a crate that comes with your demon it's pictured here and it's loaded with stuff there's a demon branded hydraulic floor jack a demon branded impact wrench a demon branded tire pressure gauge a tool bag and fender mad and whole thing is massive and it comes on a pilot that's shipped to you after you take delivery of your demon hopefully you have room in your garage and so now that you've seen the quirks and features we move on to maybe the craziest quark and that would be the owner what kind of person buy is a demon I'm gonna find out this is Carl Brauer Carl is I works with me supervises my colleagues at Auto Trader and Kelly Blue Book and this is his demon and Carl and gotta ask are you insane I am insane I think that's the best way to describe it ya know I I knew when I saw this car at the New York Auto Show that it was going to be this very special unique car and kind of a moment in time and that's alright to find cars like this whether it's a Ford GT or a dodge demon it's like okay is this a moment in time that people are gonna never forget and I think it is so you thought this was you knew and instantly this was kind of a special even with the Hellcat you were like this is this is the one the one and I had I've owned two Dodge challengers original Dodge Challenger era cars in my lifetime and I'm I grew up a Mopar guy and I've been fighting the Dodge Challenger pool since 2008 so we're now at ten years and then I went to the press event in July and I drove it what I realized is that this 800 horsepower monster isn't really much of a monster at all it was very easy to drive the car is just like Hellcat widebodies are anyone who's driven one knows that the real magic of those cars is how nice they are to drive when you aren't flooring them do you plan on drag racing I do drag racing was my first love of automobiles what got me a ended being a car guy was having a 69 Plymouth GTX with a 440 before I ever had my driver's license and I spent a lot of time in very legal ways at all times before drag racing that car and enjoying the thrill of drag racing this car is basically 15 year old Karl's dream come true do people notice it do they know that it's I mean obviously it's crazy-looking but a lot of crazy-looking challengers out there do they know that it's a D I mean you only have two weeks but even this time have they known I've had multiple people I mean on the day we were breaking in we parked it in an out burger and we're inside eating or watching multiple people taking photos of it or taking photos in front of it right and you know we I take it to a car wash here and the guy who owns the car wash is out there this is the first one I've seen right I gosh you know so you have to kind of know I think the average person might just think it's another kind of crazy-looking challenger you've got plenty of those running around California you know that right sublime TAS right right so I think a lot of people just assume it's another crazy Challenger but anyone in the know whether no hood or the drag radials yeah they know what do you do you look down another challenge of people now are you like yeah yeah I got the boss I am so much cooler I almost bought a TA in August I had a TA a test car and I fell in love with that thing when this one hit I still wasn't going to buy it because I have another bill coming soon in terms of cars yeah so that's so that is something I mean so cars getting in the new Ford GT which is one of the more insane cuz sort of like the opposite ends of the American car spectrum right which by the way again I love I love the idea of it I already have 1500 horsepower in my garage between right five GT and this car down right right over 1500 and I love the disparity in that one of them is a performance handling race car at racetracks and the other one is a straight-line drag right right right do you think this is so the Hellcat we all thought when the Hellcat came out that it was the most insane thing then this comes out you think this is it's over do you think there's a 950 horsepower would go the next gen challenge was gonna have a thousand horsepower well no manufacturers have this habit of outdoing each other we'll see what the American car companies do what their next kind of you know lob into this performance world is and who wants to up the ante next I think both of us realize that cars are not getting more you know gas hungry they're getting less gas hungry you're supposed to follow all these rules now about how how much horsepower you're burning and how much gas you're burning and it's just hard to believe that they can keep going in that dress yeah all right you ready to drive it I'm absolutely ready to drive you scared I'm scared all right time to drive the demon I have two goals here today I want to drive the demon and explore its performance and I also want to not die if you can handle it six cylinder SXT you can handle dodge demon yeah you know I had an incident with a Hellcat yeah I heard alright so the first thing that I notice you can hear the supercharger whine under sounds great even just at low speeds you can hear it but also just the rumbling of it is just crazy but that was like fairy non-aggressive what I just did like rolling onto it that won't even come close to putting it on the floor all right let's try that again I got some work Oh I'm doing they just changed you change your circumstances so quickly Wow that is crazy crazy crazy but yeah I mean drive it here if I'm not doing anything stupid it just kind of feels like a constantly sort of reminded in little ways that you're not in just a typical car the supercharged wine in the engine note are the biggest ones it's actually quite impressive how much you can hear them even just in a quarter throttle but it wine comes in the engine note but also you're looking out over this giant tall you know hood scoop I mean it's very clear this isn't just some run-of-the-mill everyday challenge nonetheless I mean I'm sitting here I can ventilate my seat if I want to I mean I got a Wi-Fi hotspot in this car I've got an eight hundred forty horsepower Wi-Fi hotspot boy this is actually kind of an interesting discrepancy here yeah next to a Toyota Mirai it's only a mission is water yeah you've got the most food even in the least polluting cars it's almost unbelievable how quickly I can break this vivillon and more importantly how easily miss people it's 50 here I'm going 52 now just with I mean a tap I mean I couldn't have gone more than a quarter throttle there and it was what four seconds we're already over then now driving on the road yeah I mean it feels like a fairly fairly normal car it actually it feels like a but pretty luxurious I'm surprised the seats are nice and comfortable they're not too grippy like a real like a sports like a go around corners Porsche you know it could be support seeds because they know that's not really intend put 480 miles on it a week and a half ago never even gave a comfort and fun it's almost unbelievable to be talking about a car that deserves to see in 2.3 seconds where comfort is like yeah of course not compromised the only difference being the rental challenger and this one from where I'm sitting is the hood scoop and this wheel everything else would be identical saddled until yeah that's 3/4 throttle I'm not even Florida there and it's like the fastest he is so much faster in my station wagon it doesn't feel wobbly and it feels that there's body roll is actually surprisingly limited considering how big it is and how heavy it is right it feels it feels flat and feels good and the feedback is so good from the steering that's another really important thing found it's the whole experience and part of it is the size of the car part of it is like oh my god I'm moving something this fast I still feel like the track Hawk almost felt more insane because I was sitting up high and it just feels like a physically huge car to feel that pain so strong it reals totally where is this I'm after a Hellcat so this is like the next step up traffic is like a new dimension and so that's the 2018 dodge demon 86 grand for a challenger with options in the inevitable dealer markup almost certainly over $100,000 for a challenger but then again this isn't just any challenger this is a challenger that's quicker zero to 60 than a Bugatti Veyron it has a better quarter-mile time than a Porsche 918 spyder it has more v8 power than a McLaren p1 this thing basically defies the laws of physics overcoming them with just endless horsepower and in a world where cars are increasingly electrified and self-driving this may just be the craziest muscle car that will ever exist and with that time for the Doug score starting with the weekend categories and styling the challenge is cool and the demon is especially cool though the design is starting to get a little old and it gives a 7 out of 10 next up is acceleration obviously this thing gets a 10 out of 10 handling is surprisingly good and the car is unusually composed for a drag racer still it's no sports car and it gets a 5 out of 10 cool factors obviously high especially right now and this thing gets a 9 out of 10 with that said I'm gonna dock importance just a bit I would have said the Hellcat was the greatest muscle car ever and then this thing came out and I don't really know where it's gonna end I'm giving it a 7 out of 10 for a total weekend score of 38 out of 50 which places the demon in some good company next up are the daily categories starting with features the demon has a lot of cool stuff but it's also missing some modern tech and I can only give it a 6 out of 10 next up is comfort and the demon is shockingly comfortable almost insanely so for a car with these numbers and I have to give it a 7 out of 10 then there's quality the interior is an improvement over the standard challenger but it still isn't exactly a luxury car and I can't give it about a 6 out of 10 practicality is good the huge trunk would normally qualify for a 5 but I simply have to drop the score a point for its atrocious fuel me and it gets a 4 out of 10 finally there's value and I struggled with this one but $100,000 challenger is just really expensive I may end up being wrong if these things hold their value well but right now I'm giving it a 6 out of 10 bringing the total daily scored 29 out of 50 add it up and the total Doug score is 67 out of 100 which places the demon higher than any Dodge Challenger as any business being it's an impressive car and not just on paper

Channel: Doug DeMuro

Views: 7,111,113

Rating: 4.8737574 out of 5

Keywords: dodge demon, challenger demon, dodge challenger demon, srt demon, dodge srt demon, dodge challenger srt demon, demon srt, hellcat demon, dodge hellcat demon, doug demuro, demuro

Id: zCp-kE9sqxw

Length: 28min 49sec (1729 seconds)

Published: Tue Jan 23 2018

Reddit Comments

[u/Otto_Von_Bitchsmack]

I love how Ford and Chevy are building great track cars and Dodge says “fuck that, let’s make a car that does wheelies”.

[u/maszpiwo]

I feel like this car would benefit from the double gas tank from the Ghibli. So you can have one with racing fuel and one with normal premium.

[u/Pepsiman34]

I would crash the Demon within 3 seconds after I leave the dealership.

[u/wcalvert]

Full tank of gas? Just 147 miles in range

Vroom vroom!

[u/UScossie]

Doug, just gotta point out one error, you said the Challenger has the widest price spread of any model but that award actually goes to the 911. The base Carrera starts at $91,100 and the GT2 RS is $293,200 making it 3.22 times as expensive vs the 3.07 between the base Challenger and the Demon.

[u/Lycopenis]

https://youtu.be/zCp-kE9sqxw?t=5m24s

Damn Doug, be gentle bro. It's her first time.

[u/icecreampopncereal]

How long until we see one of these recreating that guy outrunning the cops in his hellcat?

[u/FireflyOD]

“This thing is faster than my station wagon..” oh Doug.

[u/Mr_Ekles]

Once again, Doug lets his love for Jimmy Eat World proudly shine through for everyone to see!