Dodge Challenger SRT Hellcat Stripped Down to Its Soul: Hard Times Call For Thorough Thieves
Stripped-out cars on the side of the road in Detroit are a bit cliche. The photos of the bombed-out house and skeletons of cars were the predominant image of Detroit for many people for a long time. Meanwhile, the city is working hard to get back on its feet, but that doesn’t mean you won’t catch a stripped-out car or two. However, there are stripped-out cars, and then there is this Dodge Challenger SRT Hellcat that got robbed of so many parts that it’s hard to tell what car it started out as.
Dodge Challenger SRT Hellcat stipped to its soul
There isn’t enough left of this Dodge Challenger SRT Hellcat to even call it a Challenger. According to CarScoops, the details of the crime are unknown. No one has been arrested. Given the mysterious shell left behind and no eyewitnesses, the prevailing thought is that a group of thieves most likely took the Hellcat to a garage, stripped the parts, and dumped the hull in a neighborhood.
These were no run-of-the-mill thieves either. They clearly knew what was worth taking and how to do it. If you look at the photos, you’ll see how thorough they were about their work. The car was stripped of nearly every piece short of a few body panels and the hull.
Is parting out a car worth it?
The idea here is instead of stealing the car and trying to sell it and risk getting caught with the hot VIN, the thieves opted to go the extra mile and grab all the parts – and I mean all the parts. Most parts of a car are numbered and accounted for. Granted, engines and other performance parts can have identifying marks, but most of the rest don’t.
If the thieves were careful with the engine and transmission (maybe kept for themselves), most of the rest of the parts can be sold without fear of the stolen parts being traced to the thieves. To that end, the miscreants took it all to maximize profits.
Stolen parts include; both the front and rear fascias, four wheels, headlights and taillights, the passenger door, steering wheel, seats, dash, gauges, handles, and any other interior part you can think of, with the exception of the carpet and the driver side door panel.
And, yes, they also took the 6.2-liter supercharged V8. Although we can’t see it in the video, we can assume the transmission is also missing.
Car theft is a major problem
Since COVID, car thefts have been on the rise. The increase in demand, paired with the many production issues, has created this doomed market we find ourselves now. Used cars are trading for absurdly high prices due to the lack of new inventory. This greatly incentivizes thieves to steal used cars because the money is good enough to risk getting caught.
However, in this case, since police have been cracking down on car theft, the thieves were slick and got value out of a desirable car without all the risk.
There is something very brutal about this. The wreckage left behind conjures images of a sun-rotted corpse somewhere in the Savanah. The lions killed it, and the hyenas picked on the leftovers until the birds and sun cleaned and bleached the bones. Times are tough, and people are getting more resourceful and more brutal. I’m not sure if this counts as violence. After all, it’s just a car. But if damage to a car isn’t characterized as violence, this is about as close as it gets.
RIP Dodge Challenger SRT Hellcat.
