Drag racing is something Americans know very well, and it has always been a fuel-filled frenzy of extremely powerful V8-engined muscle cars showing the audience what they’re capable of and possibly winning the respect of fellow competitors along the way if they were to win.
But ever since Tesla, led by Elon Musk, released the silent but stupidly fast Model S Plaid in 2021, the world of drag racing slowly started to change, as the four-door American family sedan proved you don’t need a combustion engine to make sub-10-second quarter-mile runs.
With 1,020 horsepower and 1,050 pound-feet (1,420 Newton-meters) of torque from its tri-motor setup, the unassuming EV can sprint from 0 to 60 miles per hour in under 2 seconds and reach a top speed of 200 mph (321 kilometers per hour).
So what happens when you put a Tesla Model S Plaid head to head with a modified Dodge Challenger Hellcat that has about 1,000 hp? Well, the video embedded at the top of this page, posted on the Wheels YouTube channel, tries to answer the question.
Apart from the approximate power figure of the Dodge, we don’t know anything about it. At first glance, it’s similar to the factory-made Challenger Drag Pak that debuted in 2019, but the massive hood says otherwise, leading us to believe that it’s a custom affair and a pretty solid one at that.
With this being said, the fact that an off-the-shelf family EV can keep up with a purpose-built muscle car is striking, to say the least. Everybody loves an underdog, but sometimes it seems like Tesla makes it look easy going down the drag strip silently. Granted, it costs over $100,000, but a fully kitted out Dodge Challenger SRT Super Stock with a 6.2-liter V8 starts at just a smidge under $91,000, so the difference isn’t that big, especially if you consider the cost of additional mods for the ICE-powered two-door muscle car.
As always, though, go ahead and watch the video at the top of this page and then scroll down to the comments section below to let us know what you think.
