Earlier today, FCA showed us the
2021 Dodge Durango SRT Hellcat (a 710-horsepower family SUV powered by a supercharged 6.2-liter V8) and
Challenger SRT Super Stock (an 807-hp muscle car on drag radials powered by a supercharged 6.2-liter V8). As such, you could have knocked us over with a feather when we heard FCA North America Head of Passenger Cars Tim Kuniskis say that electrification will eventually come to the company’s sporty cars.
“We’re very interested in electrification, specifically for performance,” Kuniskis told
Motor1.com in an exclusive interview.
“I think it is absolutely the future of performance, and it’s what is going to enable performance to exist amid [environmental] regulations.
“I’m not going to say there’s no way to avoid it, because I’m not looking at it as something we want to avoid,” Kuniskis says. “I think it’s going to be the next evolution, the next step of even higher performance than anything that we’ve seen up until this point. It’s going to open up massive capability.”
His zeal for electrified performance is somewhat uncommon among performance enthusiasts, a group to which Kuniskis certainly belongs. He was a key player in advocating for Dodge’s first supercharged muscle cars, the
2015 Charger SRT Hellcat sedan and Challenger SRT Hellcat coupe. But speaking with him, it’s clear that he’s enthusiastic about the performance and power that electrified powertrains enable.
“Right now, electrification is not cost-effective,” he says. “Let’s say you have a trim that you want to make into an awesome electrified performance car, and you’re going to sell 5,000 of them. There’s no way to justify the expense to do that because of the cost of technology.”
However, by amortizing development costs over models with wider appeal, electrified performance becomes possible. “
When the cost...comes down across the mainstream, now that opens up the door for the crazies,” he says.
