A blacked-out Dodge Charger has been making fools of Arkansas State Police troopers for months, and the latest footage from a seventh pursuit attempt has surfaced — with the same result as the previous six. The driver gets away.
The Charger has become something of an unlikely folk legend in online automotive communities, partly because the videos are genuinely impressive driving and partly because the consistency of the outcome — police activate pursuit, Charger disappears — has taken on an almost comedic quality. Whether it’s the same car every time or whether the story has grown in the telling is impossible to verify from the outside, but the footage speaks for itself: the pursuing troopers aren’t catching this vehicle.
From a pure performance standpoint, a modified Dodge Charger with a Hellcat or Demon engine can produce power figures that most police pursuit vehicles can’t match in a straight line. Modern pursuit-rated police cars — typically Ford Police Interceptors or Dodge Charger Pursuit variants — are capable machines, but they’re not tuned for outright speed against a modified civilian car. The calculus changes on surface streets where speed is less relevant, but on open highway at 3 AM, a highly powered Charger has the advantage.
Pursuit policies also factor in. Many departments have restricted high-speed chases due to the danger they pose to bystanders, which means officers may be required to terminate a pursuit that the car could theoretically continue. Whether that’s what’s happening in Arkansas is unknown, but it’s part of the context for understanding why some of these chases end early from the police side regardless of the vehicles involved.
This story will eventually end one of two ways — the driver gets caught, or something goes wrong at high speed. Neither outcome is worth celebrating. But in the meantime, the footage keeps demonstrating what a powerful rear-wheel-drive American muscle car can do when the person behind the wheel knows what they’re doing.
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