2015 Dodge Challenger 6.4L Scat Pack — Seventies muscle car redux, especially the color., So many cars out there in the jungle, just waiting to be trapped and taken home to your two-car garage. Sedate sedans, cute coupes, wagons and SUVs, all of them willing to work, and willing to give up a few niceties for the sake of fuel economy and all-around civility. Polite cars.
Not this one. Not by a longshot.
This one is the 2015 Dodge Challenger 6.4-liter Scat Pack – a muscle car with 485 horses under the hood, an exhaust system that lets you (and the neighborhood and the neighborhood cop) know all about it and, in the end, a ferociousness that will have your right foot dancing nervously on the go pedal before just mashing down on it and watching what happens.
Wait. Before you do that, go to the screen on the center stack and punch up “Launch Control,” and, as the sign indicates, you will Launch this two-ton missile and she just screams down the street, rear tires churning up a huge cloud of smoke as you’re helplessly pinned to the leather seatback.
The big news in Challenger-land this year is that Dodge upped the ante and, for its top-of-the-line Challenger Hellcat, installed a 6.2-liter HEMI V8 putting out 707 horsepower. This insane engine made the Challenger the most powerful muscle car produced by Detroit (yes, there are more powerful engines – the Bugatti Veyron’s 1,200-horse mill, for example – but you can’t just amble down to the corner car dealer and pick up a Veyron.)
Our test car had only (only?) the 485-horse engine and it was plenty. The big 707-horse engine is really superfluous, but who am I to say? People are shelling out hundreds of thousands of dollars these days for cars that will exceed most U.S. speed limits by a factor of three and it doesn’t seem to bother them that they will get those cars nowhere near that speed.
The current Challenger is part of that retro school of design pioneered by the 2005 Ford Mustang, when Ford recreated a modern version of its runaway rock star of a coupe that in the 1960s. For the most part, the new retro Mustang kept the 1960s design cues, but updated everything else and, along the way, made it a smoother and more aggressive-looking car.
The Dodge Challenger, which enjoyed great popularity from 1970 to 1974, with engines ranging up to 425 horsepower, skidded off the rails after the mid-Seventies and became a docile, mousy little import that should have stayed home.
Dodge brought it back in 2008 and (wise decision) simply copied and updated the high-haunches 1970s look. With the 2015 model, what you get is stunning power for not very much money.
In fact, the current Challenger line starts at about $22,000, with the SXT base model, sporting a 3.6-liter, 305 horsepower V6. (I’ve seen these advertised at $20,000, which is about the price of a humdrum, pretty plain sedan.) From the SXT, you can work your way up to the 5.7-liter, 375 horsepower V8, R/T, with a base price of less than $28,000.
Our test model, the 6.4-liter R/T Scat Pack, started at $38,490 and, with options, retailed for $47,860.
It’s out on the road that you begin to see the effect this car has on you, and the effect it has on everyone around you. It didn’t help that our test car was painted an arresting (so to speak) Sublime Green. This, by the way, is one of the colors originally used on the 1970 Challenger; they also offered Plum Crazy and Panther Pink, the latter presumably named after the contemporaneous Peter Sellers movie.
Sublime Green is anything but. Small boys waved. On the freeway, a four-door Dodge Charger (no slouch in the speed department) pulled up alongside and the driver gave an approving nod. Then he punched his throttle, trying to goad me on. I was not goadable, not with the presence of that CHP Ford Explorer on the ramp up there.
On the road, the Challenger’s deep burble of V8 exhaust is a constant reminder of what you’re driving. The gas pedal was remarkably touchy and if you just blipped it, the car leaped ahead. Visibility is only fair. You’re sitting in something of a cave, and the rear quarter view is blocked by the huge C-pillars. Again, this cavil has little to do with the spirit of this car.
Fuel mileage is predictably average to low: 15/25 mpg, city/highway. On the other hand, this R/T is quick, very quick. Have we said this before? On the quick scale: Car and Driver magazine gives it a zero-to-60 time of 4.4 seconds and a top speed of 176 miles an hour.
There is a school of thought that says in today’s world cars like this are unnecessary, fuel-wasting, noisy, irrelevant carcasses of an earlier, outdated and clearly incorrect way of life. Well, that’s the school that drives a Prius.
This bad boy is for the rest of us.
In other news: I’m taking a couple of months off the reviewing circuit to take care of some long-delayed projects. Barring the outright ban of automobiles in the U.S. (stranger things have happened), I should be back in these (digital) pages some time in January. Happy Holidays, everyone.
