(Dodge)
Some fans of the Dodge Hellcats will soon have their prayers answered.
Faced with unexpected demand for its Challenger and Charger SRT Hellcat muscle cars, and their 707 horsepower V8 engines, Dodge stopped taking orders for the models in mid-March to buy some time to figure out how to build enough of the cars to fill the ones already on the books. But it looks like some relief is on the way.
Following a post on fan forum Hellcat.org that Dodge was increasing supply, an industry source with knowledge of the situation confirmed the news to FoxNews.com that Dodge figured out how to add about 1,000 cars to the build schedule. The very specialized Hellcat motor is the most powerful production car engine ever made by an American brand, and only shares 10 percent of its parts with the automaker’s other V8s.
The low-volume cars are allocated to dealers through a system that takes into account overall sales and turnaround time on the Hellcats that they do get, essentially limiting each of them to one car per month. Nevertheless, several outlets have allegedly taken orders and deposits on dozens of cars they can’t hope to supply in a timely fashion, prompting Dodge to warn customers of this practice.
Dodge has delivered over 2,200 Hellcats since they went on sale last year, but allegedly close to 10,000 orders have been placed with dealers across the country, about twice as many as it expected to build for 2015.
The extra cars are reportedly targeted at helping to fill the most pressing and legitimate orders currently in the system, but there’s still a freeze on future orders, and no word on when a thaw is expected.
However, the Hellcats are technically not limited edition products, and the company has previously said it’s happy to build as many of them as it can sell, as long as it can figure out how.
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