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
I find this guys excuse that people don’t want fully finished projects BS. I sit and watch all kinds of stuff that lingers for YEARS on YouTube. Derek at VGG has freaking 3+ hour videos for crying out loud.
Unfortunately that makes you part of the minority (as many of us here are). The vast majority of casual viewers like hit-and-run, one-topic self contained episodes. And of those, the majority click through to the end. It’s a sad reality of the short-form video market.
Creating a Hellcat powered minivan is quite different to welding the top half of a minivan to the bottom half of a Charger.. like sure it’s kinda cool I guess but I’ll echo others that I would have waited to see a proper built one.
Bonus points if it was still fwd.
This isn’t putting a Hellcat drive line in a minivan, it’s putting minivan body panels on a Hellcat Charger. Somehow the article manages to jump me back and forth between knowing the difference and being confused / misleading.
No mistake, if my butt was going to be in it under power, I’d much rather be in what it is than what the sales pitch says it is.
Hellcat minivan should be mid engine with the glorious v8 sitting where the mid row seats were with a lexan engine cover. A new Hemi under glass if you will.
Meh, between the Ford Supervans and Renault Espace F1, a front-engined minivan just doesn’t do much for me. Would have much rather seen Rich keep the T&C mostly whole and cut a hole in the middle for the Hellcat.
I immediately lose interest in a project when I’m told from the outset that it’s going to be half-assed. I understand this is just how you have to do it when you create meme builds for casuals, but I would much rather watch a years-long project that’s built the right way.
I’d rather see it with one of those K-car minivans. Buy like 3 or 4 of them to make it wider/longer as needed.
As a proud Grand Caravaner, that they did this in the Town & Country and not the Dodge just feels wrong.
Since AMG put a V8 in the R63 then that platform seems like an (easier?) idea. It looks Pacifica-ish (I think there was tech used?), swap the emblems. Find a R class, not a R63 (unless the the head bolts have departed which happened) and install the HellCat
Honestly, the Dodge Caravan R/T was nicely spicy courtesy of some ECM programming tweaks and the Pentastar VVT V6. If you want a sleeper minivan, it might be worth tracking one down. My wife absolutely loves schooling the “I won’t let a minivan in front of me!” idiots in her wheelchair-adapted one. Which, as a matter of fact, comes with some very nice non-stock lower body cladding that looks darn good alongside the larger wheels on the R/T.
Be prepared for some sticker shock on some maintenance/repairs, though. The brake calipers/pads/rotors share the parts bin with the Viper, which makes it a bit of an oddball in the shop. And the performance rear load-leveling struts don’t come cheap either. Everything else seems to be garden-variety Mopar, at least. Which just means ‘beware current Stellantis price-gouging’.
I had one of these. It was great until the tranny said bye bye. I sold it to someone who repurposed it as a work van, and it’s still rolling to this day.
Swapping the stock shitty brakes for the largest I could find was the winner. The stock booster could handle the twin piston calipers, and eventually, they became stock in the last few years of it.
Really good van, and served us really well. Too bad that Dodge circles the bowl
I suspect that’s the reason why the R/T version got utilized for some wheelchair conversions. The bigger brakes can pretty much stand it on its nose. With the added weight of the additional metal and reinforcing needed to do the conversion (The entire floor from the firewall to the rear wheel arches is cut out, lowered, and welded back into place) plus the weight of a power chair routinely carried in the vehicle, the stock brakes on a Voyager/Caravan are OK but not confidence-inspiring.
I found it to be a great hauler for a family of 6 and that thing could get down when needed. But chewing through the stock brakes (and I truly wasn’t driving like an asshole) in less than three weeks was bananas. Threw on the larger ones and it was great. I had way more problems with an earlier Sienna than I ever did with the Dodge.
Rich’s words are so real. I feel like there’s 7 people left who have the patience to read my long-form prose build and test reports on my website, and I’ve gotten a lot of requests over the past decade to make Youtube videos or nowadays get on Tiktok with silly van and robot content.
Besides the added overhead of video production, what I’ve also witnessed as someone with a bunch of friends in the Makertube™ domain is you gradually shift to a model where you structure the project around making the video, instead of vice versa, in an attempt to chase The Algorithm or retain audience attention. Rich seems to say this pretty openly. It’s not the way he wanted to do it, but it’s the way The Algorithm demands.
People think of YT and content creation as a way to “be your own boss” but you will always be a slave to the platforms and their opaque, ever-changing algorithms. It’s sad, but true.
Even I fall into the trap of losing interest in most long term builds on YT after the 3rd or 4th episode.
I prefer an OCD build.
I was a big fan of build threads on car forums, with regular updates and well-documented processes. They served as entertainment and also served as reference materials for people doing similar projects.
TikToks will never be as useful for sharing actual knowledge, but almost all that forum content is gone forever.
I miss highly documented build threads on forums. I recently made a how-to thread for a forum I infrequently visit and all the responses were condescending variations of “beware the attention seeker”. It reminded me why forums are nearly dead now, and why the YouTube videos that replaced build threads have more throws to “like, share, and subscribe” than the close-up details that would make the videos actually useful.
Youtube is the worst.
Even if it’s a two minute answer, it needs to be wrapped in ten minutes of shyte so they can get ad money.
If anyone cuts to the real information and presents it in a short video, it gets shuffled down the search results.
Exactly! I used some YouTube videos for some minor engine tuning yesterday. I already knew how to do most of it, but there was one detail that was eluding me. I watched two worthless videos that each had thousands of views and were heavily padded for the ad money time. The third video was perfect – great explanation on what to do and how to do it, complete with close-up shots and a thorough description of each step to take. Naturally, it only had a few hundred views…
I know he said he didn’t use the Pacifica because it was too expensive but I think that is a huge miss here. The Town and Country looks so dated compared to the Pacifica. Even the second generation Pacifica (the first one as a Minivan) before the facelift would have been better. The first ones are nearing 8 years old at this point, should be able to find some crashed examples to cobble together.
I didn’t even know of the Pacifica that wasn’t a van! Looks like an All-Road. I kinda want one.
You really don’t. They are an odd shape and size combined with all the quality of mid-2000s Chrysler. I spent way too many hours wrenching on a friend’s because the pile of crap was constantly breaking, and it wasn’t that far out of the warranty period. To add insult to injury, it wasn’t particularly nice to drive nor did it have the luxury ride Chrysler claimed. It was crazy expensive, though in true Chrysler fashion it depreciated like a rock.
I guess I’m the oddball that would watch a 2 year build of a Hellcat Minivan.
You’re not the only one. I followed long builds on Vortex & USMB almost 3 decades back. Even remember how much more quickly the threads would load when I got a 56k modem.
Watch? I’d read a whole damn thread on a forum!
Would an LS4 fit under the original minivan’s hood? 😛
Possibly, but you can’t truly hoon with fwd. This build is gonna burn off the rear rubber.
The minivans were available with AWD 😉
Which AWD that fits handles 800ft lbs torque?
“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.”
Sarah-n-Tuned knows this, but she bucks the trend anyway, presenting her mostly-solo projects step by sometimes-tedious step. Currently she’s two years into swapping the V8 from her father’s wrecked Tundra into a 1974 Celica, along with OCD resto-modding the car. So there’s a marketplace for slow shows.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=yM3JeaDtjVc&list=PLmhNtwDcrRxFuv87ARWbjqQrWpC5n7LRI
Seriously, how long did it take Project Binky to actually move under its own power?
Exactly.
Or Aaroncake’s Mazda RX-5?
Sarah-n-Tuned has enough dorkiness and cuteness to get people watching her videos even if her builds were not overflowing with OCD and pure talent. The complete lack of filter when she is reviewing cars is quite often hilarious also.
No Sto ‘n Go seating means no sale.
wat