Someone Paid $700K for the Final Dodge Challenger Demon 170
It’s a lot of coin for a Dodge, but the entire hammer price went to the Kristi House charity.
A few months ago, Dodge revealed the last hurrah for its internal combustion muscle cars with the Dodge Challenger Demon 170. Claiming 1,025 horsepower, the Demon 170 is the most powerful production car Dodge has ever made. Naturally, all 3,300 allocations were spoken for pretty quickly but Dodge decided to make one for the Barrett-Jackson auction in Las Vegas, where it sold for a total $700,000. Thankfully, that immense price tag is going to good use. The entire hammer price went to Kristi House, a non-profit organization that provides treatment and advocacy for children who've suffered abuse and trauma.
When the Demon 170 first hit the auction block, with Nicole Kidman as a guest auctioneer, it sold for $400,000. Then, in a stunning surprise, the winning bidder donated the car back, so it could be auctioned off again. The second time around, the winning bid was $300,000, totaling $700,000. During both auctions, Nicole Kidman also donated VIP tickets to see her husband Keith Urban's show in Vegas.
What's interesting about this winning bid, though, is that the final winning bidder doesn't actually get a car right away. Instead, they won the last build slot for the Demon 170, which allows them to customize their Demon with options and even a custom color. A normal Demon 170 starts at $100,361 after destination ($1,595) and gas guzzler tax ($2,100).
However, customization isn't why someone pays seven times the normal price. The Demon 170 is Dodge's supercharged love letter to muscle cars. Its unique engine, built from Dodge's C170 "Hellephant" crate engine, is nutty. It makes 1,025 horsepower and 945 pound-feet of torque with E85. With normal 91 octane pump gas, those figures drop to 900 horsepower and 810 pound-feet. With its Mickey Thompson ET Street R 315-section drag radials, Dodge claims it can hit 60 mph in 1.66 seconds.
The Demon 170 will even do the quarter-mile in an NHRA-certified 8.91 seconds. Though, it's actually banned from all NHRA-regulated tracks in its stock form because it can do the quarter-mile in under nine seconds but doesn't come with a roll cage or parachute as standard. That makes it one of the fastest production cars in the world, behind only multi-million dollar electric hypercars, like the Rimac Nevera and Pininfarina Battista. And now this owner has the very last one to ever be made.
Update [6/28/2023 @ 3:45pm ET]: A correction was made to the auction location and the double bid. A previous version of this story incorrectly stated that the auction was in New Orleans and that the $700,000 was a single bid.
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