When you spend your hard-earned money on a street-legal dragster capable of pushing 1,025 HP and 945 lb-ft of torque out of a supercharged 6.2-liter HEMI V8, engine noise usually sounds like sweet victory. However, for roughly 345 lucky owners of the 2023 Dodge Challenger SRT Demon 170, that metallic rattling coming from under the hood isn’t raw American muscle clearing its throat. It is the sound of an impending automotive catastrophe.
Dodge has recently identified a critical flaw affecting roughly 10 percent of the total 3,300 Demon 170 production run. The culprit behind the potential drama? A defective crankshaft damper and its retaining bolt.
While that might sound like a minor hardware oversight for a vehicle designed to pull wheelies off the drag strip, failure of this tiny component can lead to catastrophic engine failure. Your six-figure muscle car might turn its supercharged V8 into an extremely expensive paperweight before you even reach the track.
Interestingly, Detroit isn’t issuing a full-blown safety recall just yet. Instead, Dodge is issuing a targeted Customer Service Notice aimed strictly at the affected batch based on specific component manufacturing dates. So no, not all 3,300 Demon 170s need to rush to the service bay.
But if you own one of the unlucky 345 units, Dodge CEO Matt McAlear, speaking with Mopar Insiders, offered some very blunt advice: do not attempt to drive the car to the dealership. Dodge has already received reports of actual engine failures, proving this isn’t just theoretical paranoia from corporate lawyers.
Dodge is generously picking up the tab. The company will transport your Demon 170 to the dealership and haul it back home once repaired. On paper, replacing or fixing the crankshaft damper takes about two hours, though Dodge remains oddly tight-lipped about the exact hardware fixes being performed.
Still, if you hear odd noises coming from the engine bay, the moral of the story is simple: leave the keys on the counter, call the flatbed, and let Dodge deal with its own demonic exorcism.
