The Father of the Hellcats, Tim Kuniskis, just told journalists that Dodge “struggled through a very tough point in its product lifecycle. Last year, Dodge was selling one SUV, the Durango, and only one version of the Charger, two door only, and electric only.”
Now the brand will “shift into second gear” Kuniskis said during Stellantis’ turnaround plan presentation on Thursday in Michigan. A crossover named GLH will serve as the entry point to the lineup while a Durango refresh is in the wings (again) along with SRT-badged variants of the Charger. There’s also some kind of range-topping muscle car that appears to live outside of the Charger nameplate, but the outline looks like that of a wide-body Charger with a huge wing.
“We’re going be adding a true entry-level performance vehicle, a gateway into the Brotherhood of Muscle,” Kuniskis said. “Think of it as the next generation of Hornet, but the way we should have done it the first time.”
It will be called the GLH, as in Go Like Hell, and will cost less than $40,000. And yeah, hopefully things will go better for this than they did for the car that never quite took America by swarm.
Kuniskis didn’t go deep into these future Dodge products other than noting that the Durango is getting a refresh. The executive didn’t even make mention of the SRT-badged Chargers on the way that are listed in the automaker’s product plans.
As for the Charger-looking SRT product (bottom left of the image above), it’s unclear what this is. The wing is huge, the body is wide, and it’s hard to imagine it isn’t a Hellcat, but the Chargers on the bottom right of the product plan image have the SRT flag.
This leads one to wonder if the Banshee will be resurrected as a king of the Dodge lineup to be even quicker down the drag strip than the resurrected Hellcats. Or perhaps this is a new showcase model for the Hurricane I6? The Hemi may still be in the midst of its comeback tour, but it can’t have all the fun, right? Time will tell.
“Look, we know this playbook. We wrote this playbook. Dodge will literally be back on track, literally and figuratively, by the end of the plan, and Dodge will be restored to its proper position,” Kuniskis said. “ And we will recover the number one selling muscle car title.”
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