The Challenger and Charger Hellcats have never been sports cars. That wasn’t even the idea. Too old, too heavy, too plush to ever be considered in the category. Which then raises the question: Why bother constraining this Homeric engine to living entirely within sporty shapes? That line of thought led to the Jeep Grand Cherokee Trackhawk, FCA’s best invention until the dawn of this, the 2021 Dodge Durango SRT Hellcat.
The fundamental limitations holding back the Charger and Challenger are also endemic to SUVs. You can, obviously, accuse the Durango of being overweight and less engaging than a proper sports car, but that’s true of the X5 M, GLE 63, and everything else on the ladder up to and including the Lamborghini Urus. Ford will happily sell you a muscle car that makes over 700 hp, holds up to repeated lapping, and provides sports-car tactility. No such competition exists for the Durango, certainly not at its $82,490 starting price.
Among its super-SUV compatriots, it fares well. That 710-hp engine is the defining feature of any Hellcat product, but there’s a surprising core competency in this chassis. Which could be a result of low expectations; after all, no one expects a 5710-lb Bronze Age SUV to feel nimble. Yet the Durango manages its own inertia well, steering with precision and turning in eagerly. No doubt you’ll lose ground to the sprightly X5 M through hairpins, but its composure is nonetheless impressive. Restraint must be exercised to prevent all four wheels from erupting in smoke. Ease onto the gas and you’ll find this Durango as predictable as it has to be, the thought of a truly untamed 710-hp SUV too harrowing to ever be palatable.
This comes into clearer focus when you try to stop the Durango. Gargantuan 15.7-inch front brakes with six-piston Brembo calipers put up a good fight, but as any armchair physicist will tell you, trying to stop a 6000-lb SUV on all-season tires on 32-degree roads isn’t going to instill confidence. Objective dry-weather braking tests put the Durango in line with other mega-powered SUVs, but in practice there’s a primal recognition that it’s remarkably easy to end up in over your head with a vehicle that mixes so much horsepower with this much weight.
God, though, the power. Forget the numbers. Focus on the bellow, the bass drum bravado, the overtones of artillery-shell whine. Ejected ten feet behind you, staggering quantities of exhaust gasses bombard the air with such conviction in their own authority that the whole phenomenon actually starts to feel permissible. It’s hard to imagine the Lord would give us this kind of hellfire if He didn’t want to see us try to wrangle it. And try the Durango does, deploying all-wheel-drive and a remarkably tuned version of ZF’s omnipresent eight-speed automatic in the service of turning rage into some sort of forward motion. Sixty arrives in 3.5 seconds, 100 in frankly not enough time after that. Your eyes set dead ahead, knuckles whitening, mind utterly disabused of the idea that all-wheel-drive provides enough grip for you to thumb the traction control off button. Give it six, eight, twelve drive wheels and it wouldn’t make a lick of difference: No amount of all-season rubber can convert 640 lb-ft of torque into unhindered acceleration.
Even with the assists fully enabled, a half-second with your foot on the floor can lead to spiritual awakenings and introspective crises. Disable them and you’ll find that the Durango Hellcat is not merely capable of four-wheel drifts; it is entirely disinterested in anything else. Best to leave the electronics on for canyon carving, where the explosive power and excellent body control provide exciting less-than-lethal entertainment. Which is, after all, the point. Many SUVs provide obnoxious power outputs and staggering performance metrics; few cause anything resembling visceral excitement. The Durango does, not through tactile feedback and poise, but through sheer force of will. You’ll grin not out of whimsy, but shaky-legged awe.
As a result, daily driving the Durango feels sinister, underhanded. There’s a force here that others don’t know about, constantly reinforced by the engine’s echoing low-frequency background hum during highway cruising. Its vibrations bounce through the body, send shivers up the seat rails. Whereas a Challenger Hellcat is fast because of course it is— just look at the thing—the Durango is fast because there’s a hidden rage under its relatively tame bodywork. It’s almost illicit.
Without that ever-present rumble it would be easy to forget that you’re driving anything special. The suspension is stiffer than a standard Durango, and can be sharp over potholes, but the overall demeanor is relaxed. There’s none of the granite-springed harshness that amplifies every pebble, a la the Alfa Romeo Stelvio Quadrifoglio. It’s a slightly tighter SUV, one with the space and easy endurance to dispatch 500-mile drives when necessary.
Just don’t assume it’s a luxury SUV. Despite its $82,490 starting price, the Durango Hellcat is the ragamuffin of the super-SUV crowd, undercutting the BMW X5 M by over $20,000 despite its horsepower advantage. Those cost savings are evident inside, where the Durango’s cheap black plastic and simple design betray its age and mainstream roots. The mediocre materials, the absence of basic features like one-touch rear windows, and the embarrassing crash-test scores of the Durango lineup suggest that corners have been cut in Dodge’s attempts to keep it fresh. Power ain’t free.
As a family hauler, then, the Durango features significant downsides. As a performance SUV it’s a hair-raiser. As thrilling as a Stelvio Quadrifoglio or Lamborghini Urus, sans the bone-shattering ride of the former or the eye-watering price of the latter. A compelling enough proposition, in fact, that it’s already sold out. That’s a shame. For the first time ever a Hellcat product is not just the most potent vehicle in its class, but also the most engaging.
Mack Hogan previously served as the reviews editor for Road & Track. He founded the automotive reviews section of CNBC during his sophomore year of college and has been writing about cars ever since.
