What happens to muscle car-loving bad boys and girls if and when they decide to grow up? Squeezing kiddie seats into the back of a two-door tire shredder is totally possible, but contorting yourself in there to do up the harnesses gets very old very quickly. This is why people start buying SUVs, and sobbing alone into glasses of strong alcohol late at night as it dawns upon them that they will never again have the chance to be cool, or irresponsible, or badass.
Dodge sees you guys, and it understands. Hell, some of the SRT team themselves probably have children of their own now, ones that they're prepared to acknowledge and drive to kindy from time to time. Thus, they have built themselves, and the rest of us, a practical family sedan that is still utterly badass. A car that lets you bend toward adulthood, but not break.
The 2020 Dodge Charger SRT Hellcat Widebody is the single meanest four-door production sedan on the planet, in our view. Its 6.2-liter Hellcat Hemi V8 makes a whopping 707 rear-wheel-drive horsepower (527 kW) and 650 lb-ft (881 Nm) of torque. It makes that power with a stirring soundtrack, dominated by the whine of the supercharger force-feeding it with air.
The Widebody part is the new bit, meaning that Dodge has fattened the Charger with lurid wheel arches and 20x11-inch wheels. There are big Brembo six-pot brakes behind those spokes, and a new suspension setup including Bilstein 3-mode adaptive damping.
Performance-wise, the extra Pirelli rubber on those wider rims allows the Charger to hit 60 mph (98 km/h) in 3.6 seconds, which is not bad at all, and enough to generate some whoops and hollers from the back seat if you're lucky enough to have kids that don't poop themselves and cry when you hit the gas. The quarter mile is a hair under 11 seconds, and this family four-door tops out at an exorbitant 196 mph (315.4 km/h).
We know our dear New Atlas readers will all want to compare it to a Tesla. Don't compare it to a Tesla. It's not a Tesla. Nobody is intimidated by a Tesla, no matter how fast it accelerates with its hyper-effective traction control. There's a big difference between having people look at your car and think "there's goes somebody with a lot of money who's super future-forward and cares about the environment," and having people look at you and think "I hope that wobbly-hinged psychopath and his unreasonable children don't look at me."
Cars like the Charger are rolling amygdala-activators, they activate fight or flight responses in everybody around them and separate the predators from the prey animals. Some people enjoy feeling like predators. They know you don't like their neck tattoos, they know you don't like them burning lots of gasoline and frying tires in an unsafe manner. That's how they like it. This car is for them.
Do the thicker tires on the Widebody edition make it harder to steer? Yes, but Dodge has fitted an electronic steering system to sort that right out. Does it lose features like Line Lock burnout mode and launch control just because it's got rear doors? No, it does not. Indeed, the Charger SRT Hellcat Widebody's extra grip makes it a touch over two seconds faster per lap on Dodge's test track than the narrow body.
There's also a cheaper version, and it carries on the most horrific naming conventions in the Dodge stable: the Scat Pack. I don't know who decided naming a car after actual feces was a great idea, but they sure handed a free kick to anyone who wants to make fun of you for owning one.
The (shudder) Scat Pack version has a naturally aspirated 6.4-liter Hemi V8, making a very decent 485 hp. It does 0-60 mph (0-98 km/h) in 4.3 seconds, and 12.4 seconds on the quarter mile, so it's not slow. Dodge celebrates the (ugh) Scat Pack as the best horsepower per dollar you can get in a production sedan.
Let's make something clear: no roaring muscle car, wide-bodied or otherwise, will actually help you stave off the crushing burdens of family responsibility, or the creeping deterioration of age. They may, however, permit you to rage slightly less impotently against the dying of the light.
Enjoy some nasty surpercharger noises and lots of smoky tires in the video below.
Source: Dodge/FCA
