Yahoo Autos 2023 Dodge Hornet First Drive Review: 268 reasons to be abuzz
ASHEVILLE, N.C. — This is a year of transition for Dodge. As the Charger and Challenger burn rubber into the sunset, dealers are making space on showroom floors for the brand’s first all-new model in a decade. Filling the void left by those low-slung, muscular brutes is the 2023 Dodge Hornet. This lean, mean, all-wheel drive crossover has big tire marks to fill. Can a punchy little runabout based not on a grain-fed German luxury sedan, but a lithe, Mediterranean compact with an Alfa Romeo badge satisfy the cravings of America’s Brotherhood of Muscle? We set off for the hills of western North Carolina to find out.
Dodge calls the Hornet its first compact crossover SUV. That alone is worth parsing. At face value, it checks out: The Journey was closer to a midsize crossover, while all of the brand’s older SUVs were either bigger or the Nitro, a sort of missing link between traditional body-on-frame SUVs and crossovers. But while we’re on the subject of forgettable ChryCo products of the 2000s, there was also the Dodge Caliber. Sure, it was a hatchback and a rightfully derided one. But how different conceptually was it from today’s sea of subcompact “crossovers” (or even contemporary vehicles like the Toyota Matrix/Pontiac Vibe twins for that matter)? It offered features that truly crossed over from the old-school SUV segment, including all-wheel drive — something you can’t even get on some modern “crossovers” — and maybe our memories are a bit fuzzy, but we’re pretty sure Dodge was keen on accentuating the Caliber’s cute ‘ute attributes, too.
Anyway, it might be a stretch to say that the Hornet is Dodge’s first small crossover, but whatever you want to call it, it came out swinging. The standard Hornet packs 268 horsepower and 295 pound-feet of torque, which is the most you’ll get out of any standard compact SUV engine by a country mile. AWD with brake-based torque vectoring is also standard, along with a nine-speed automatic transmission. If this is all starting to sound familiar to you, that’s because it’s almost identical to what you get in its luxury platform-mate, the Alfa Romeo Tonale.
Upgrade to the plug-in hybrid R/T model and the 2.0-liter gets tossed in favor of a 1.3-liter gas-burning inline-four and two electric aids: a 44-horsepower belt starter generator mated to the six-speed transmission up front and a 121-horsepower motor powering the rear axle. The real headline here is the system’s combined torque output: 383 lb-ft. Its 288 total system horsepower is made underwhelming because the R/T relies on a gimmick to hit that number.
Dodge calls it “PowerShot,” and to use it, you’ll need juice in the Hornet R/T’s battery. The amount of boost you get will be directly proportional to its state of charge. At peak output, it delivers 30 horsepower and helps the Hornet hit its advertised 5.6-second 0-60 time, which is 1.5 seconds quicker than the best result you can expect from just flooring it in “Normal” mode (or 0.9 quicker than the GT). To be clear, that’s not 30 more horsepower on top of its rated 288; that figure is already baked in.
Worse, you have to jump through hoops to use it. First put the Hornet into “Sport” mode via the dash button, then pull back on both wheel-mounted paddle shifters simultaneously to engage the system. The car will perform a quick check and display an icon in the cluster. At that point, you floor it all the way to the kick-down detent and let the computer sort out the rest. You can do this from a stop or a roll. So long as you have battery to sacrifice, the Hornet will gladly perform the ritual. Having tried it twice (once for a juiced up “hole shot” and once from a highway roll), it’s frankly underwhelming. Lopping 1.5 seconds off the 0-60 time may be a huge advantage, but the math doesn’t translate 1:1 to excitement.
When you strip away the PowerShot silliness, what you’re left with is a “performance” PHEV that weighs 400 pounds more (at more than 4,100) and offers 10 horsepower less than the ICE model it’s based on. And you’ll note that to this point, we’ve yet to turn a single corner. So, let’s do that.
We had opportunities to try out both the standard GT and the PHEV-based R/T on squiggly little bits of asphalt criss-crossing the Blue Ridge Parkway. The route took us from the center of town in Asheville south into the pine woods lining the French Broad River. The speed limit for much of the route was a pleasant 55. At a cruise, the Hornet is admirably quiet and plenty comfortable — dare I say European?
Our first outing was in the 2.0T-powered GT, which eats uphill onramps for breakfast. It shrugs off elevation with aplomb and never feels outmatched even by the 3,700-pound Hornet. Engaging Sport mode in the GT will tell the computer to wait longer to upshift and command more throttle and the torquey little four-pot dutifully serves up oomph with even a hint of right foot. It's a bit punchy this way for basic cruising, but it's not as intolerable as some sport tunes. Leave it in "normal" and it fades dutifully into the background. Good engine.
And what of the suspension? The Hornet comes standard with Koni Frequency Selective Damping (FSD) shocks. They employ a parallel dual-valve system that can amplify hydraulic forces within the damper piston without the need for complex (read: expensive) electronic hardware, meaning they can automatically increase or decrease damping based on the flow of hydraulic fluid alone.
