I don’t have a problem, fundamentally, with the Prius. It does what it sets out to do, I guess. But it’s far from perfect. It can be improved. You can, for example, stuff a 800-horsepower supercharged V8 out of a Dodge Challenger Hellcat in there, making it fast enough to pretty much rip your face off.
A standard Hellcat does, indeed, make a mere 707 horsepower. But Nick Fillipedes, who runs the American Racing Headers team out of Long Island, says that this particular example has been fiddled with even further, bumping it up to 800 horsepower at the wheels.
In fact, it’s a little unclear how much of the car even is a Prius anymore. Gone is the Prius’s sad CVT transmission, which likely would’ve been ripped into a million little pieces by the torque of the new engine. Instead, it’s got a six-speed manual, as is proper.
But more importantly, the Prius chassis itself is gone, too, according to Road and Track, having been replaced with a custom double frame-rail chassis. So I’m not even sure this even counts as a Prius anymore.
Do I care? No.
What matters is that there’s a Prius Hellcat in this world, it does a quarter mile in less than 10 seconds, and it sounds like bliss.