The Model S Plaid Is Tesla's Hellcat

Two American manufacturers are outliers. One, a future-forward group that was all-electric from day one, has carved out a niche by seeing cars as tech products. Another, a beloved relic of America's muscle car past, makes just three massive cars. Both have the same problem, that their core product is a sedan that has not been updated in about a decade. Both have the same solution, too.

The companies, Tesla and Dodge, have almost nothing else in common. One has presented itself from day one as the giant-killing future of American cars, while the other has thrived in the past decade as little more than the brand that makes moving monuments to straight line performance. But their unique, odd business models have forced both into a strange corner, and they have both chosen to navigate out of that corner by simply making their once very ordinary cars outlandishly fast through a nearly-annual cycle of adding horsepower to what were once mid-market sedans and SUVs.

For Dodge, this is the Hellcat line. The first 707-horsepower Challenger was announced in 2014, but in the time since that outlandish motor has found its way into the Charger, the Durango, the Jeep Grand Cherokee, and the Ram 1500. At some point, that number stopped being impressive enough. So Dodge released the Hellcat Widebody, Hellcat Redeye, and the Demon, three cars that simply asked "What if there was more?" The end of the Journey and Grand Caravan mean every product Dodge makes is available with that comical 6.2-liter supercharged V-8, while there are as many Hellcat-equipped Challenger variants available as there are core Dodge products. The project is simply bringing a very large hammer to a situation that doesn't require a hammer at all, but it is absolutely working.

Tesla's Model S, revealed in 2012, is certainly more modern than the Charger platform that dates back to a 2006 release, but it is now nine years old in what has become the flagship segment for electric performance cars. Every competitor is much newer. So Tesla, with its access to ever-improving battery technology as the wind in its sails, started making the Model S fast. That started in 2014, with the P85D that boasted 532 horsepower. Within a few years, "Fast" became the P100D, which bumps that number up to a Hellcat-challenging 762 hp. But, as Hellcat showed us, outlandish is not enough. If an old car is to be interesting, you need to keep doing more.