On Saturday, September 26, the parking lot at the Stellantis Technical Center in Auburn Hills will host a free gathering for car enthusiasts. The Design Cars + Coffee event will run from 9 a.m. to noon in Lot 28, on the site where the Walter P. Chrysler Museum once stood. Owners can bring vehicles from any brand, a format that has made previous editions feel more like a gathering of Detroit’s broader car scene than a traditional corporate showcase.
Stellantis brings Cars + Coffee back to Auburn Hills this Saturday
The Stellantis Product Design Office organizes the event. At past gatherings, designers have brought concepts, vehicles from the company collection and rare models that enthusiasts rarely see outside major auto shows. Visitors add their own cars to the mix, from restored muscle cars to garage-built projects. Part of the appeal comes from seeing an experimental concept parked next to an everyday privately owned vehicle.
This year’s poster features two pickups from very different chapters of Ram history. The first is the Ram 1500 Rumble Bee SRT, shown with a 6.2-liter supercharged V8 producing 777 hp. The second is a 2004 Dodge Ram SRT-10, the production pickup that used the Viper’s 8.3-liter V10 and produced 500 hp.
Seeing the two trucks together would make for an interesting comparison, but Stellantis has not released a final list of display vehicles. Their appearance on the event poster therefore does not confirm that either truck will actually show up on Saturday.
The choice of those models still says plenty about the audience Stellantis hopes to attract. The Ram SRT-10 came from an era when an automaker could put a sports-car engine into a production pickup. The newer Rumble Bee SRT follows the same pursuit of extreme performance with a different technical approach, at a time when high-performance trucks continue to attract a strong following in the US.
The event will take place at the Chrysler Tech Center, 1 Chrysler Drive South, and organizers say coffee will be available. Stellantis has not published a complete vehicle lineup, so visitors heading to Auburn Hills will have to discover on site which vehicles the company brings from its collection and what owners bring through the gates.
