(Dodge)
Want to know how to make your car a LOT lighter? Eject the seats.
That’s apparently what Dodge did to the Challenger SRT Demon, the upcoming extreme version of its Challenger SRT Hellcat muscle car.
Motor Authority reports that Dodge dropped over 100 pounds from the car by deleting its rear bench and the front passenger seat, and a Dodge spokesman confirmed the detail to Fox News.
Removing the rear seats to make a special lightweight version of a street legal sports car isn’t that uncommon -- Ford does it to the Mustang to create the Shelby GT350R, as does Porsche for the 911 GT3 -- but the passenger seat? Not unless you’re building a race car.
Dodge appears to be trying to make the Demon as close to one of those as possible. Along with the seats, it also stripped out the spare tire, trunk liner, a bunch of sound insulation, all but two of the speakers, the electronic parking sensors and the power-adjustable steering column.
Talk about roughing it.
Aside from all of that, it did swap in a few lighter parts, including a set of open-lug aluminum wheels, aluminum brakes and a hollow sway bar for a total net loss of 215 pounds compared to the Challenger SRT Hellcat.
To keep the barely-legal theme going, the Demon has a button marked Race Gas on the dashboard, that hasn't yet been explained, and comes equipped with street-legal drag radials.
We’ll find out a lot more in the coming weeks as Dodge posts a new video every Thursday leading up to the Demon’s full reveal at the New York International Auto Show in April.