Someone Is Finally Creating The Hellcat Minivan Dodge Didn’t Have The Guts To Build

The first Hellcat was just a Dodge Charger, a simple American muscle car made special with 707 horsepower. It was pretty fun, so Dodge then started dropping the same V8 engine into coupes, trucks, and SUVs for good measure. What they never gave us was a Hellcat minivan. Now, someone has finally taken it upon themselves to right this historical wrong.

That person is Rich Benoit. You probably know him by his popular YouTube channel, Rich Rebuilds. He’s made a name for himself with outlandish and meme-like builds. His V8-swapped Tesla was a particular hit some years ago.

Now, he’s taken it upon himself to redeem Stellantis and its biggest oversight of the past two decades. He’s building the Hellcat minivan, so I hit him up for the story so far.

Rich has long been a fan of Dodge’s most ridiculous felines. “I love anything V8, so when the Hellcat was introduced as a massive four-door luxo-barge with seating for five, I had to have one,” he says. “I now own three personally, including a TRX.”

But why a minivan?

“The minivan is something that has been swirling around in people’s heads for a long time,” he says. “Dodge had the habit of putting a hellcat motor in just about everything since then BUT the minivan.”  Indeed, all the way back in 2016, there were whisperings and rumors of a Hellcat Pacifica. Fiat Chrysler designer Ralph Gilles only added flames to the fire when he posted a sketch of a juiced-up Pacifica to Instagram. Alas, it never came to pass.

Rich explains that at one point, fellow YouTuber Freddie “Tavarish” Hernandez was contemplating a build, but backed out when he instead invested in a McLaren P1 project. “I went to his house to ask him if he minded that I took it over,” says Rich. “He surprised me by offering me his Pacifica and Hellcat motor, but I declined… the idea was to cut it up and I would feel horrible [doing that] with someone else’s car.”

Rich showed me some early photos of the build. We see his Charger Hellcat, which was formerly green and had 850 wheel horsepower. It’s had the entire top of the body cut off. Meanwhile, there’s most of a Chrysler Town and Country, which is being lowered over the top of it for early fit checks. “To be clear we did not want to do it this way,” Rich explains. “We wanted to go the right way, [which is more] time-consuming.” However, his prior experiences in doing crazy builds on YouTube meant he’s focusing on quick and easy execution.

“We built the first V8 Tesla and it took years to complete,” he explains. “It had no transmission tunnel, so [we had to] cut the car in half making a new tunnel, make custom front and rear subframes, engine mounts, harnesses, exhaust, cooling, driveshafts…” It was a gargantuan amount of work. “A week before we unveiled the V8 Tesla, someone put an old Ford V6 into a Tesla shell in a few days,” he says. “It barely ran, and people still asked ‘Well what took you guys so long?'”

That’s what it’s all about, right there.

He estimates that manually swapping the Hellcat drivetrain into an intact Chrysler minivan would take at least a year before it moved under its own power—and that doesn’t work for his business model. “Unfortunately, in today’s content creation landscape of TikTok and Instagram Reels and YouTube Shorts, if people don’t get their instant gratification then it’s dead in the water,” he explains. “I know that I couldn’t keep people hanging on for several months before they lost interest in something like this.”

This time, he’s going for a speedier build—by cutting up the two cars to mate them as quickly as possible. “Unfortunately fabrication and attention to detail is a lost art with this new generation,” he says. “After this happened [last time], I said “fine, I’ll do it your way.'”

The project is moving along at a fast clip. “We are far along enough to hopefully run the first few tests in a week,” he says. “We still need to make a rollcage, reinforce the subframe, and strut tower bars before we give it all 850 horsepower.”

Rich notes that he did want to base the build around a Chrysler Pacifica, but practicality pushed them in a different direction. “They were too expensive,” he says. “This van and the body parts are much cheaper and easier to find.”

At this point, I had to ask an important question. How many seats will it have? “We will know for sure once we lower the body,” says Rich. Sadly, though, the original minivan seating won’t be practical. “The stow-and-go seats are no longer an option as the massive driveshaft tunnel now gets in the way, as does the exhaust,” he explains.

Instead, the plan is to retrofit new seats that better suit the finished build. “Ideally we would like at least six buckets, but it also depends on the roll cage routing,” says Rich. “I’m sure with more time we can make it all work, but more people care about it doing rolling burnouts than seating capacity.” Actually performing those rolling burnouts might require a little road trip, though. “Another disadvantage to living in the northeast… it’s frozen here, no tracks open for five months,” he says. “I’ll likely drive it to Florida where all the action is.”

Only dodge would slap a hellcat engine in a mini van ????‍♂️????????????
byu/theboss3001 incarmemes

There have been a lot of Hellcat minivan renders over the years.

 

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Fiat Chrysler designer Ralph Gilles even dabbled with the idea of a hot minivan back in 2016. Sadly it never came to exist as an official Dodge or Chrysler product.

Nobody would call building a Hellcat minivan easy. No modern minivan on the market was ever really intended to fit a chunky supercharged V8, let alone one with such massive and offensive horsepower. However, Rich has demonstrated previously that he knows how to pull off complicated meme builds with a good level of functionality. We look forward to seeing him succeed once again.

Image credits: Rich Benoit