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It’s hard not to froth about the Hellcat. And then, shimmering under the lights, is the Hellcat Redeye Widebody, which is a whole other thing. This one has an 8-speed automatic, but perhaps because of the Challenger’s advanced age, it’s one of the rare cars that still comes with a manual transmission as standard equipment. It’s a beastly thing, with 485 claimed horsepower. Lodged in the middle ground is an R/T Scat Pack Widebody, which doesn’t do much middling at all. At around $35,000, it’s an oddity-a muscle car that begs for snow tires, slush, and ice. The thriftiest of the lot is the V-6 GT, the only all-wheel-drive variant. The Challengers represent an outrageous array of price and power. We wait out the action with the cars lined up under flashing incandescent awnings. In old-town Vegas, we’re not even a sideshow. In most places, a six-figure parade of loud, rude Americana would draw attention. We’ve witnessed a street fight and had a photoshoot ruined by a light show, both on the same schmaltzy block. First, we’ll have to get out of Las Vegas.įord Mustang Performance Pack Two: First Drive A spread of Challengers and 1500 miles of the best highway in the West. Why? It’ll take a little driving to find out. It recently startled industry observers when it outsold both by thousands of units in the last quarter of 2019. What is it that keeps a model feeling fresh into its teens? What is it that keeps it selling well? After all these years, the Challenger is more than keeping up with the Ford Mustang and Chevrolet Camaro in sales. Dodge has been making this Challenger since 2008, a dozen years of production handily tripling the four-year run of the original car. They cautiously plod out of airport rental agencies on coltishly skinny wheels. They hover in the opposite lane, seemingly suspended in roiled hot air by Highway 95’s oasis near Mercury, Nevada. There’s a Challenger towing a dirt bike on a trailer, just off Avenue V-8 in California. It’s a kind of Western camouflage, ubiquitous without being obvious. In this huge and ever-changing landscape, the Dodge Challenger somehow manages to fit right in. This story originally appeared in the May 2020 issue of Road & Track.

Leave the desert comfortable in shorts and a T-shirt and your teeth will be chattering like crazy at the first mountain pass. Just up the road, in southern Utah, lunch is served by women in heavy prairie cotton. Stop for breakfast in Vegas and your waitress might be wearing a cocktail dress. Red rocks turn to scorched volcanic craters, then endless bleached-blond sand. In an hour you can cover the distance between a thriving city and a crumbling ghost town.