The 2025 Dodge Durango Hellcat is terribly fast and terribly old
It’s been on sale since 2011 but adding a supercharger has certainly kept it fresh for the last couple years!
I wanted to fall in love with the 2025 Dodge Durango Hellcat. On paper, it is the best kind of monster I adore–ridiculously powerful, large and in charge, and menacing looks. But it’s been a week since I drove it and I’ve completely forgotten about it. It came into my life, left, and now I look forward to new things. This is not what you want when you buy a new car, especially one that costs one hundred thousand dollars or more.
Dodge is good at making cars look menacing. Albeit sometimes a bit gaudy, not at all like a seven-passenger SUV turned straight-line rocket ship. If you didn’t hear my sarcasm, let me tell you that the Durango, in its current form for over a decade, is a hard canvas to turn into something interesting. Sure, the blacked-out hood in the 2XA package is pure racecar inspiration, but the jellybean rolls and curvaceous lumps and hooves aren’t appealing in an era of straight lines and brutalist styling. We’re currently in 2025 but this car looks more at home in the mid-00s alongside the Neon SRT-4, Viper ACR, and Ram 1500 SRT-10. There is a corporate theme here that ran its course well over a decade ago.
But with seven hundred and ten horsepower do you care if it looks like your automotive priorities peaked during the Great Recession? This Durango can terrifyingly take you and five of your friends from zero to sixty in 3.4 seconds and a quarter mile down the road as fast as 11.7 seconds. It is an object that should not be this fast. It feels wrong, yet so right when you plant your right foot as hard as you can into the firewall. I’m a lover of big and fast things and it made me infatuated with joy hearing the supercharged 6.2L scream after endlessly scrolling and adjusting the SRT menu’s track and sport features.
That is, however, where the love story ended. We’re at the end of a great movie franchise that went on too long but somehow squeezed out a half-decent sequel after ten iterations. The Durango is our sad clown at the end of the movie and it’s too fat, too old, and yet we want to give it a great big hug.
Dodge is phasing out the supercharged V8s because Polar Bears need ice and you’re tired of air conditioning in October. This is the end of the line. The other Hellcat’s have been culled. Gone are the Charger, Challenger, and TRX. It is the Durango that is left. God knows what the new Trackhawk will have, but likely it will be the turbocharged six-cylinder Hurricane and not the lovely 6.2L Supercharged Hemi. I guess it’s with that knowledge that I’ve already divorced myself from anything Hellcat—it’s dead and I can’t let it seep back into my heart. Let’s just hope the next generation of bonkers fast SUVs and cars grab our attention like Dodge can only do best.
Cheers!
M. T. Blake
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