How the Dodge Hellcat came to be rap music's favorite muscle car

USA Today

12 hours ago

When Jay Motley rolled up, a woman in the crowd just had to ask: 'What kind of car is that?'
Motley, the owner of the mysterious vehicle, had just crawled the rose gold and white machine up the curb cut, through the gravel, and parked it on the scene of a music-video-in-progress earlier this summer on the west side of Detroit. A crowd of young, happy creatives parted and watched as he rolled through.
Motley calls the car his 'Pretty Penny.' The custom lettering on the brake calipers and the embossing in the fully repainted engine bay serve as name tags. Motley brought the Pretty Penny to the car meet extravaganza, complete with DJ and the video shooters, hosted by 24-year-old Detroiter Khalil Jewell, a rapper known as "Lelo."
And to answer the curious woman: Motley's Pretty Penny is a 2023 Dodge Durango Hellcat, and it fit right into the gritty Detroit energy at the event.
It's a ridiculous vehicle by all measures, even if it were without the custom paint job and nametags. It is everything in excess: Three rows of seating, 710 horsepower, a 6.2-liter supercharged HEMI V8, nearly three tons of curb weight, and a face-melting 0-60 done in only 3.5 seconds.
When you punch the gas pedal in a Hellcat, the supercharger punches you back — into the seat, that is.
The wide bodies, snarling engines and the sometimes-thumping speakers announce with no shame that the Hellcat is much like the grade-school bully of the highway: stout, unreasonable and intimidating. In support of such aggression, the Hellcat engine is named after the Grumman F6F Hellcat, a deadly World War II fighter plane. But there is also a precise analogy between car and animal kingdom: When you hear that supercharger whine, there is an undeniable feline nature (think mountain lion or panther, not tabby cat).
The Durango Hellcat is more than just a flashy Dodge; it is the culmination of the brand's years-long quest to master marketing and muscle. Since 2015, the Hellcat has been Dodge's hallmark engine, attracting collectors, hobbyists and power enthusiasts from across the country. But in Detroit, the Hellcat has a more particular, localized allure wrapped up in the music and automotive history of the city.
Over the last decade, Detroiters and musicians alike have gravitated to the Hellcat and the Dodge muscle car bodies that house the engine. On any given night in Detroit, there are good odds you'll spot a Hellcat of some variation speeding up and down Woodward Avenue, blasting rap music.
Despite a slowdown in Hellcat production (Dodge killed the Hellcat Charger and Challenger in 2024, opting to produce the next generation of their muscle car as an electric vehicle), the future of the engine lives on in the hearts of a lively automotive subculture dedicated to the Hellcat.
What is a Hellcat?
In 2015, Dodge was at a crossroads.
According to Olivier Francois, the CEO of Fiat and Stellantis' chief marketing officer, Dodge was stalling as an everyday car brand.
"Dodge was a mainstream car brand," he told the Detroit Free Press, part of the USA TODAY Network. "We wanted to carve out our own stream."
So the brand overhauled its products and its marketing approach. Francois and then-Dodge CEO Tim Kuniskis ditched the "Mr. and Mrs. Smith" models, like the Grand Caravan, Journey and Dart, and went in on high-performance, emphatically American cars.
"When Tim came, he said, 'Hey, we need to be sharper. We need to do something, you know, we need to tell people what this brand stands for,' " Francois recalled. "So, first thing, we launched the Hellcat."
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The Hellcat is not one specific car, but rather an engine: The supercharged V8 under the hood of Motley's Pretty Penny makes the car a Hellcat, not the Durango body itself.
Such power demands a certain gravitas, said Kevin Hellman, the senior vice president and head of Dodge product for Stellantis, Dodge's parent company.
'They're not cars that you need," Hellman said of the variety of Dodge's Hellcat offerings, which included the Charger, Challenger and Durango models. "You want it, and you want it a lot because … you smile every time you start it,' Hellman said.
So in 2015, the marketing arms of Stellantis (at the time known as Fiat Chrysler Automobiles) "rebuilt all our communication around the Hellcat," Francois said. The company built a "halo" around the engine — a marketing tool used to create a positive perception of one facet of a brand that seeps into the way consumers perceive the rest of the brand's offerings.
The goal, Francois said, was not to sell a million Hellcats. Rather, it was to develop a brand identity around the high-powered engine while offering less powerful — and therefore more affordable — versions of the vehicles, which would be boosted by the positive perception of the Hellcat.
"It was not about selling many of them, right?" Francois said. "It was about creating a halo for the brand."
A meandering stream
Francois built a campaign called the "Brotherhood of Muscle" for the Hellcat and aimed sales toward gearheads. Commercials were set to the tune of hard rock music and full of American, gas-guzzling bravado — a contrast to the up-tempo scene in west Detroit where Motley's Pretty Penny showed up.
Buyers like Motley weren't the target audience. To Francois, the "Brotherhood of Muscle" was launched to capture a "gearhead" audience and reshape the perception of the Dodge brand.
In 2015, Dodge launched a Hellcat advertisement with a Phil Collins soundtrack. At the time, Kuniskis told the Free Press the Hellcat was built to be a positioning statement — to "send a very strong message about the brand personality and attitude."
Francois, who has put musicians such as Bob Dylan and Eminem behind the wheels of Stellantis vehicles in Super Bowl spots, knows that music sells cars.
"I personally am not a hard rock or a heavy metal guy, I really don't know anything about that as a European," the French marketing executive said on a video call from Italy. "But I know that it is a good sound for Dodge."
And Dodge, advertised with the sounds of wailing guitars, successfully rebranded as a high performance American manufacturer. As Francois put it, the brand went from the mainstream to its own stream.
Since 2015, though, the stream Dodge carved out for itself has meandered through America — and through Detroit — and captured a different audience with a different soundtrack.
Country? Rock? No way
The Hellcat, advertised with hard rock, become fashionable in the rap scene, especially in Detroit. Through a confluence of local affinity for the Detroit Three automakers, the inarguable fun that comes with driving the machine and a rapper's tendency to buckle into the fastest, coolest cars, the Hellcat became a hip-hop mainstay.
During a recent ride along with the Free Press, Mohammed Mahmoud — everyone calls him Mo — wasn't playing classic rock or country music. If he wanted to listen to country, he said, he'd be driving around in a Ford F-350.
When he drives his 2023 Dodge Charger Jailbreak Hellcat, though?
"Always when you're driving this car, you're 100% playing rap music," Mahmoud said. "You've got so many rappers that are rapping about these cars, and they're popular on social media the same way they're popular in music."
As he blasted down West Fort Street and Woodward Avenue in downtown Detroit, that was exactly the scene. Mahmoud played a few songs by Detroit-based rapper 42 Dugg, coincidentally turning the stereo on moments before the rapper name-dropped the Hellcat in his 2019 song "Dog Food."
As Mahmoud bent corners around Campus Martius, the song narrated the moment: "Baby, we in Hellcats."
And somehow, despite booming speakers, squealing tires and a heavy law enforcement presence due to a Tigers home game at Comerica Park, Mahmoud and the Free Press journalists in tow avoided attention from the Detroit police officers lining the blocks.
To Mahmoud, attracting attention from enthusiasts (a group that sometimes includes police officers) is the reason he drives his Hellcat.
"You want to get attention? You've got to get one of these," Mahmoud said. He loves the attention — and he drives like it — but his Hellcat means more. The car, like many other cars in the Motor City, tells a story about his family's roots in the automotive industry.
Mahmoud grew up as a car-loving kid, looking up to his grandfather, who worked for Chrysler for more than 35 years, he said. His brother, his cousins, his grandfather — they're all car guys — have bonded over his ride. Mahmoud's cousins regularly film skits with the Hellcat and post them to social media — a family affair that has netted tens of millions of views.
Though Mahmoud allows his cousins to take the car out whenever they want, his grandfather, on the other hand, wants nothing to do with it.
"I pulled up, and I remember the smirk on his face," Mahmoud said. "He's sitting on the porch, and he's just smirking. He looked at me, he's like, 'Take it back. Go get rid of it ... I know what this vehicle is.' He's like, 'If you want to fly, go get in an airplane.' "
Mahmoud flies in his Hellcat. In fact, Mahmoud was tracked down for this story after he flew toward a Free Press reporter's vehicle on Interstate 94, pulling alongside and wagging his tongue at the driver before speeding away. Driving the way he drives might raise most people's blood pressure. Not so for Mahmoud.
"To me, cruising is just stress relief. Some people go to get a massage. Some people got to go on vacation," Mahmoud said. "To me, you just, like, put the radio on. I can just cruise — drive (an) hour, hour and a half. You can clear your mind. You have fun with it. You go back home and you're refreshed."
'This is all part of the culture'
Jay Johnson, a 35-year-old Detroiter in the crowd at Lelo's show on the west side of Detroit, brought his HEMI Dodge Charger to the car meet and was pleased to see it featured in the backdrop of the video shoot.
While it's not a Hellcat, Johnson said he bought his HEMI V8 Charger for a few reasons. For one, it's a car he knows is "decent." He's owned four Chargers in his life, and he said he can rely on it for equal doses of fun and dependability.
Another reason Johnson bought the V8 Charger?
"These cars, they influenced us," Johnson said, referencing models made by the Detroit Three and the halo created by the Hellcat. "The motors, the interiors, you know, our grandparents working at Chrysler. All those elements had an impact."
Johnson said he wasn't compelled by the hard rock, American-muscle advertising of the Hellcat. He didn't buy his Charger because pop singer Billie Eilish drives a Dodge, nor did he buy the Charger because he's fond of Phil Collins.
The allure came from a slightly different place, rooted in his family's automotive history in Detroit, like Mahmoud, and an aura Johnson perceives around Dodge's muscle offerings.
"Growing up in Detroit, you know we love the fast money, the fast cars, the fast life," Johnson said. "Like I said, we kind of grew up on appreciating that. Growing up, what kid didn't like fast cars?"
Surrounded by cars and loud music, Johnson said the youthful energy of a kid who likes fast cars never quite left him.
"This is all part of the culture," Johnson said, gesturing toward the cars and artists scattered through the lot at the Detroit car meet: young people in designer jeans, combat boots and tiny shirts; rappers, painters, DJs and even an older gentleman scrambling around with a carton of cherries, offering the fruit to anyone who asked.
Similarly, Motley's Pretty Penny — the V8 Charger's bigger, badder cousin — has flourished in the rap scene. In June, his Hellcat won second place at the Rick Ross Car Show in Atlanta, hosted by the multiplatinum, nine-time Grammy-nominated rapper.
In contrast to Motley's and Johnson's insider perspective into the rap scene of Detroit, Interscope Records Vice Chair Steve Berman knows the Detroit rap game from the outside.
Berman might be best remembered as the record executive Eminem "shot" and argued with in recorded skits on his albums, but those were only skits; Berman is alive and well, and in a conversation with the Free Press, he said that the decades of gritty automotive culture of Detroit has seeped into the region's rap music.
"What is represented in Detroit is really a foundation for an incredible depth of story," Berman said. "I feel like the foundation of what Detroit represents is so important and impactful as a story of the world."
And the Hellcat — a car Berman described as "timeless" — stands to tell "the story of America," he said.
Berman compared the earth-shaking engineering of the Hellcat with the longstanding musical creativity of Detroit. At the root of it, he said, is a universal story.
"Like, it's tough to make it in the world. The world is hard. And you want to innovate. You want to be able to evolve as businesses evolve, as people evolve," Berman said. "Detroit, the cars, the music, it all represents that because it has had to embrace so many different challenges as technology changes, as business changes, as, you know, the world changes.'
At the intersection of the music industry and the automotive industry — where cars sell music and music sells cars — there is an indelible connection that, Berman said, is greater than the sum of its parts.
Likewise, at another intersection — the intersection of West Chicago Street and Hartwell Avenue — Lelo hosted an event that brought the two industries together.
Music bounced out of the speakers. A crowd — young and old, Black, white and Middle Eastern — bounced to the sound. The multicolored under glow on Motley's Hellcat twinkled while attendees moseyed around the car, pointing fingers and asking questions.
Minutes earlier, Lelo stood beneath a dangling microphone and prepared to record a music video. Flanked by a Mercedes AMG GLC 63, a tuned-up Nissan 350z and, of course, Johnson's Charger, he took a breath, wiped his face and locked his eyes on the camera held a few feet before him.
Then the music started.
Free Press videographer Justin Wan contributed to this report.
Liam Rappleye covers Stellantis and the UAW for the Detroit Free Press. Contact him: [e-mail].