First Drive: 2015 Dodge Challenger

2015 Dodge Challenger Scat Pack, 2015 Dodge Challenger range, 2015 Dodge Challenger R/T, engine. Click image to enlarge

Review and photos by Brendan McAleer

Driving a lime-green muscle car is a public service. Seriously, you might think this five metre-long showboat is just the kind of narcissistic nonsense that currently plagues the modern world, but it’s not. As we wind down through the Columbia Gorge, the 6.4L V8 grumbling away softly underhood, every single person who caught sight of it immediately started grinning like an idiot.

Portland, Oregon, is best-known for beer, bicycles, doughnuts, and weirdos. I’m not being facetious either, that’s practically the official slogan from their tourism board. It’s a city full of bridges that get as clogged as a coronary come rush hour, with streets narrowed by bike lines and hipsters – hipsters as far as the eye can see.

Well, enjoy my artisanal, hand-crafted burnout you tattooed fedora-enthusiasts. It’s the hit single from a band called My Right Foot, and you’ve probably never heard of it. And it’s not to be taken ironically either.

I kid, of course, because believe it or not, the Challenger engenders no such antisocial tendencies. This is a cruiser and a bruiser, the kind of car where you roll down the window to listen to the rumble instead of obsessing over Nürburgring lap times. It requires a bit of a sense of humour, a love of old school ethos, and an iPod full of AC/DC. Needless to say, I loved the hell out of it.

Refreshed for 2015, the entire Challenger lineup gets a sort of elephant-strength botox to take some of the flab out of the previous design. Up front, a newly lowered hood lip (Chrysler calls this a brow) now curls over the quad headlights, and the grille sports split rings in the manner of the 1971 Challenger. The face seems to glower from the four LED rings, but not in an overaggressive way. If anything, it reminds me of the old E39 BMW 5-series – and just look at how well those aged.

There’s a new front splitter for R/T and up models that visually lowers the Challenger, but the V6 model without it looks even more faithfully like the 1970s original. From the side, visual mass is reduced a bit by available striping packages, with wheel sizes running from 18-inch on the base SXT V6 models to an immediate jump to 20-inch alloys on everything else. Wheel width varies from 8-inch on the cosmetic-package wheels to 9-inch on the Scat Pack and 9.5 on the SRT 392.

Out back, designers have added in some black plastic to draw the Challenger earthwards, but it’s the single angle that’s still not quite right when you see the car on the road. Credit this to the fact that while the new car is within a cat’s whisker of the width of the original, it’s 120mm taller. In the lighter colours, it looks fine. In black, it’s just massive.

Happily, the Challenger’s sizable dimensions give it both a presence on the road, and plenty of space inside. While I klonged my head off the sunroof when wearing a helmet on the track, mostly there was plenty of room in the cabin with an upright driving position. It’s a tank, but as we squeezed out of the city, scraping wasn’t an issue. That’s the view up front – the three-quarter blind spots are huge, so set your mirrors right, and blessed be the standard backup camera otherwise you’d be squashing pedestrians and scuffing lampposts seven days a week.

The car we used for the first portion of the morning’s drive was a 6.4L Scat Pack, decked out on its flanks with the madly grinning little yellow-and-black mascot from the old Super Bee. Power for the big stove option is here a healthy 485hp @ 6,000 rpm and 475 lb-ft @ 4,200. Other engine options in the range include the 305 hp V6, which is actually rather sprightly, and the 375 hp 5.7L V8, your bargain V8 bruiser.

2015 Dodge Challenger Scat Pack, dashboard. Click image to enlarge

The Scat Pack designation means you get the 6.4L sledgehammer, Brembo four-piston front brakes, a beefed up suspension, rack-mounted adjustable-effort power steering, wider alloys and grippier tires, and adjustable driver settings as part of the Uconnect system. The optional appearance package with which this car was fitted includes matte-look aluminium wheels, blacked-out grille surround, and a bumble bee stripe on the rear.

There’s a choice of transmissions, with the Challenger getting the excellent eight-speed automatic gearbox that made the SRT Grand Cherokee such a surprisingly economical highway warrior. Of course, this being a lime-green muscle car, there’s also a six-speed manual gearbox, which loses the pistol-grip shifter this year.

The eight-speed’s a far better fit for a cruising machine, but with an engine this big in a car this colossal, the stick just adds a sense of occasion. It’s like heel-and-toeing in a Sherman tank.

2015 Dodge Challenger driver’s view, media screen, centre stack buttons, Performance Pages. Click image to enlarge

On the interstate, the Challenger burbled along through traffic with the windows down, the lone complaint that I couldn’t put my arm up on the window, the sills being too high. With the new Mustang on the cusp of release, it has to be said that Dodge’s interior refresh is extremely impressive. A cleaned up dash is now dominated by an 8.4-inch touchscreen that handles most functions, and is among the industry’s most east to use. However, using some of the performance pages shows the system to be very laggy as it boots up g-meters and launch control adjustment.

For normal functions it seemed quick enough, and even had a bit of tongue-in-cheek humour with the ability to replace the boring old arrow-shaped icon with a tiny red Challenger avatar. Connectivity functions worked without flaw, and I was able to crank out some Bad Company to go along with the racket from the 2&3/4-inch wide exhaust. Now containing electrical baffles, this is already as loud as it needs to be, and eschews the current fad for piped-in electronic engine sound in favour of the good ol’ fashioned open-the-window-n’-downshift.

2015 Dodge Challenger. Click image to enlarge

Off the highway, we tackled one of my favourite bits of road in the Pacific Northwest: the Columbia River scenic byway. Last time I drove this delightfully twisty piece of tarmac, I was in a Honda Odyssey with a toddler. This time I’m in a stick-shift aircraft carrier the colour of Kermit’s collar. All righty then.

Truth be told, this sort of bendy mountain road is more Miata than muscle car, but the Challenger is actually fairly tractable. It can lunge forward like a deranged bison when it needs to, but it’s happier to just rumble on down through the curves, giving bicycles plenty of room and generally being not too much of a nuisance. That big, lazily torquey V8 crackles and growls even when it’s just loafing around. It’s quite a lot of fun actually – and when we get stuck behind a school bus the kids nearly lose their minds.

Back out of the valley and over the Bridge of the Gods, we hit the sort of sweeping intermediate highway that’s the true natural home of the Challenger. If ever a car were an 80 percenter, this is it; where you have to flog something like an FR-S to within an inch of its life to have any joy, the Challenger is best driven in a flowing manner, with the tunes up and a bit of a blip to the throttle now and then, just to nip past a slowpoke. Being green hasn’t ever been so easy.

Off the street, we hit up Portland International Raceway for some on-track action, something that you wouldn’t ordinarily attempt in a muscle car. Here, the eight-speed-equipped Challengers impress with the broad swathes of toque combining with rapid changedowns to make for surprisingly fast laps. Naturally the day belongs to the battalion of Hellcats here, but even the V6 proves to be a fun little beast, with a great deal less weight up front. The sheer amount of mechanical grip is surprising, but so is the comparative ease of the drive. It’s hard to make a case for this car as a 2,000 kg track weapon, but if you want to hit up your local circuit for some high-performance driver training, it won’t embarrass you.

Heck, you might even embarrass a few traditional corner-carvers if you keep your inputs smooth enough.

True, the idea that a Challenger could make for a dedicated track rat seems a bit ridiculous, but then, this is a car that takes itself seriously only just enough to be good. Riding in it is less about saving up for that carbon-fibre helmet than it is about sending away to CAA and AAA for some paper maps, putting them up on the wall, and throwing a dart at them to plan your next road trip. This car makes you idly wonder about driving to the Grand Canyon with your high-school best friend, just for the hell of it. It’s a capable GT compared to the smaller, nimbler pony cars.

The Challenger is big, comfortable, powerful, and it makes people happy – even people on bikes. What’s the old line about it taking more muscles to frown than to smile? Turns out when it comes to big dumb grins, it takes just a single muscle car.

Pricing: 2015 Dodge Challenger Range/strong>
Challenger SXT: $28,995
Challenger R/T: $36,993
Challenger Scat Pack: $45,995
Challenger SRT 392: $51,995
Challenger Hellcat: $63,995