Photo: original image by autoevolution
Dear muscle car enthusiasts and fellow journos, next time Dodge launches a 707 hp Challenger, let’s all drive the car and then pretend nothing happens, shall we? Perhaps sparing the hype will keep dealers from coming up with the ridiculous markup we see now.
Sure, the aforementioned $150,000 dealer premium, which leads to an overall price of $212,175 may not be real (sound more oh-hell-no than hellcat), but dealers asking between $10,000 and $20,000 for their slice of this supercharged pie is certainly a cold, hard piece of reality.
We’ll return to that in a few moments, but let’s consider the 150 grand “market adjustment” before we move on. First of all, such practices usually work when we’re talking about cars that come in limited numbers, which isn’t the case with the Hellcat.
Of course, it would be nice to let that Performance Exhaust share the feelings and emotions of the Hellcat V8 with the state of California, but Perry Chrysler, Dodge Jeep Ram, the San Diego dealership that supposedly came up with this isn’t going to trick anybody into paying almost double the price of a Viper for a Challenger.
A quick search on Autotrader reveals that while markups of up to 20 grand are out there (we’ve also added such an example below, coming from a different dealer), you can also find Challenger Hellcats retailing for their actual price.
The one argument that, for us, tips the balance towards “fake” when it comes to the behemoth markup above is the fact that the sheer idea of this car is the affordability. A Porsche or a Bentley guy would never pay the same amount of money (make that more money for the German carmaker) for a muscle fetish.
Update: As Perry have confirmed, that window sticker is real and yet they're not trying to sell a Challenger Hellcat for north of $200,000. The mind-blowing dealer markup was a scheme to keep customers who wanted to make MSRP offers away until the dealership could decide the actual markup it would put on the car. They thought such a move would keep people from wanting to purchase the thing, which it did, but it also helped the photo travel the virtual world.
So Perry is joining the let's-add-something bandwagon after all, but not to the ridiculous extent the image was showing.
We’ll return to that in a few moments, but let’s consider the 150 grand “market adjustment” before we move on. First of all, such practices usually work when we’re talking about cars that come in limited numbers, which isn’t the case with the Hellcat.
Chrysler is trying to prevent such ill practices
In fact, Chrysler has even tried to prevent such... financial engineering by rewarding its dealers for how quick they find owners for Hellcats - in a bid to limit such greedy practices, the automaker has introduced a rule that sees a certain dealer being allocated extra Hellcat units based on how fast it can see the ones it has in stock.Of course, it would be nice to let that Performance Exhaust share the feelings and emotions of the Hellcat V8 with the state of California, but Perry Chrysler, Dodge Jeep Ram, the San Diego dealership that supposedly came up with this isn’t going to trick anybody into paying almost double the price of a Viper for a Challenger.
A quick search on Autotrader reveals that while markups of up to 20 grand are out there (we’ve also added such an example below, coming from a different dealer), you can also find Challenger Hellcats retailing for their actual price.
The one argument that, for us, tips the balance towards “fake” when it comes to the behemoth markup above is the fact that the sheer idea of this car is the affordability. A Porsche or a Bentley guy would never pay the same amount of money (make that more money for the German carmaker) for a muscle fetish.
Update: As Perry have confirmed, that window sticker is real and yet they're not trying to sell a Challenger Hellcat for north of $200,000. The mind-blowing dealer markup was a scheme to keep customers who wanted to make MSRP offers away until the dealership could decide the actual markup it would put on the car. They thought such a move would keep people from wanting to purchase the thing, which it did, but it also helped the photo travel the virtual world.
So Perry is joining the let's-add-something bandwagon after all, but not to the ridiculous extent the image was showing.
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