I think it’s safe to say that we here at The Drive (and many of our readers) are fans of the Dodge Challenger SRT Demon and its no-shits-given approach to drag strip domination. Some of our colleagues over at Automotive News, however, aren’t quite as enthusiastic.
In an anonymous editorial titled “Keep the Dodge Demon Off our Roads,” Automotive News deemed Dodge’s new nine-second drag star/marketing stunt much too wild for public roads and called into question its street-legal status. “The 840-hp Dodge Challenger SRT Demon from Fiat Chrysler is so inherently dangerous to the common safety of motorists that its registration as a road-worthy automobile should be banned.” The anonymous author goes on to compare SRT’s passing off the Demon as a road-worthy vehicle to Tesla’s alleged controversial practice of beta-testing its self-driving tech on customer cars that run around on public highways.
“From its barely legal slick tires to its monstrous acceleration, the Challenger Demon introduced in New York this month is the result of a sequence of misguided corporate choices that places bragging rights ahead of public safety,” reads the editorial.
Damn. AutoNews continues to praise the auto industry’s great strides toward safety recently, but scolds Dodge for “spitting on that goal and irresponsibly moving in the opposite direction, knowingly placing motorists in danger in the process.”
What do you think? Has Automotive News been suddenly taken over by overbearing mothers, or is the Demon really, as they put it (borrowing a phrase from Ralph Nader’s book of the same title), “unsafe at any speed”?