The Hellcat Isn’t Dead After All

There’s been much talk about the tragic death of the Dodge Hellcat, but it appears things are turning around rapidly inside Stellantis. Now that the killjoy former CEO Carlos Tavares is gone, it appears work is in progress to reverse the damage he did, including bringing the Hellcat back.

Ford is cooking up something special for the next Shelby GT500.

Immediately after Tavares was shown the door, it came out the he alone wanted to ditch the Hellcat engine in pursuit of just electrification. That sparked hope the Hemi V8 and especially the supercharged variant would be making a comeback, and that certainly seems to be exactly what’s in the works.

A new report from Mopar Insiders cites unnamed inside sources, claiming the Ram TRX with the Hellcat V8 will be returning for the 2026 model year.

Even better, the TRX will reportedly be pushing 717-horsepower, constituting a little performance bump versus the previous version. That’s a nice little present on top of everything.

The report doesn’t say if Dodge will start cranking out new Hellcat engines. There’s a stockpile of assembled powerplants which apparently will be used in the 2026 Ram TRX. But that stockpile can’t last forever.

If Stellantis wants to turn the ship around in a hurry, and it needs to with lagging sales thanks in part to disillusioned customers, it needs to be getting a factory retooled to start cranking out Hellcat V8s again.

Supposedly, the new Dodge Charger was secretly engineered to fit the Hellcat V8 under the hood. We can’t confirm if that’s true, but if so it seems everyone was secretly hoping for Tavares to be gone so they could get back to making real muscle cars again.

The lesson here is never ask a European for their opinion on American muscle. You’ll get a lot of words but not a lot of sense. Stellantis made a huge mistake and we hope it’s working on rectifying it right now.

Image via Stellantis