Fancy a Hellcat but none of the stock colors do it for you? Blue Pearl? Yellow Jacket? Plum Crazy Pearl? Four shades of gray? Go Mango? White Knuckle? None of those draw enough attention to your large and loud car? You want something really special?
Well, how about this rusted look?
There’s a lot of benefits to it. First, it is a fact that rust is lighter than carbonfiber, even visually. Second, why spend two winters in the deep north to achieve this look when you can have it today in Arizona?
This 2015 Challenger Hellcat with a proper manual transmission and only 13,000 miles is for sale at Arizona Chevy dealer for only $48,989. Oddly, the ad doesn’t mention anything about the paint or wrap, what ever the hell this is. Did someone trade it in for a Vette?
Buy yourself a rusted Hellcat
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22 responses to “Buy yourself a rusted Hellcat”
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Considering so much of a car is plastic these days, it seems a bit inauthentic, but someone did a helluva job on that wrap.
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Including all that ‘patina’ rust on the plastic bumpers. It’s a wrap!
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Take it along to car shows and park it with all the other faux-tina cars!
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The outward appearance is the 2nd-worst thing about this car. (The 1st-worst thing is that it’s the manual. The Challenger TR6060 is trash.)
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The more I read about Chrysler products, the less I understand people buying them. You seem happy with your automatic, but if the manufacturer can’t get something as basic as engine-clutch-gearbox-coordination right, aren’t you wary they struggle with other stuff, too?
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The gearbox was the only thing really wrong with that car, between the Chrysler-specific issue of the clutch function and also the synchronizer issues that GM and Ford TR6060’s had too.
One thing that perturbed me was late in my ownership of that car, when I brought it in to the dealer to report the clutch issue just to pick it up 2 days later with “no trouble found.” Watching from the waiting area I saw the service advisor give my keys to a subordinate to go get my car from the back lot and bring it forward; the subordinate returned much later than I expected and without the car, then the service advisor left and brought my car up. It led to me wondering: how irrelevant are manuals in the US market if being able to drive one isn’t a requirement to have a car-driving role at a car dealership that sells and services them?
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I learned to drive a stick on a mid-60s Mercury with a 4bbl 390, three on the tree, manual steering, and a clutch so stiff my left calf visually outsized my right. You get used to it. To each his own on transmission choices, but no amount of horsepower makes up for the boredom I feel driving an automatic. I’ll happily give up half of my engine’s power for a manual.
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That Challenger’s clutch was light… it’s just that the engagement point was variably somewhere between half an inch off the floor and halfway up the pedal travel (with a few occasions like that one where the pedal needed to go another half inch into the floorboard) so it stopped being fun. That and I’m a farmer’s kid who grew up driving all kinds of different manuals in the farm machines, so to me the shifting is just part of the job of driving some things and not a significant loss if not required.
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Odd… isn’t clutch engagement adjustable?
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Not with that transmission… the slave cylinder is bolted to the front cover of the gear housing of the transmission, it’s hollow with the input shaft going through it and it’s unitized with the throwout bearing. My theory is the input shaft grease wasn’t always letting one of the friction discs come enough out of contact with the flywheel, middle plate or pressure plate.
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Wow, that’s a bummer. I’m not a big FCA fan in general, but I do appreciate muscle cars, and the Challenger fits a pretty unique niche. It’s a shame they didn’t engineer the manual transmission better than that.
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Is it a multi-plate clutch? Seems pretty bizarre otherwise. No doubt the dealer would never be able to replicate the problem, unless you found out about a TSB.
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It was a dual disc clutch; there wasn’t a TSB but there was a warranty-system case number that got cited all over the Challenger forums. (Of course it “didn’t apply to my car” because the date on that case was a Thursday and my car was built the following Tuesday…)
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Sounds like the same sort of thing (aka, fix it quietly) but mixed in with the usual “oh no, your problem is entirely different”… Nothing like customer service really!
There were some early FPV F6 Typhoon’s here that had a twin-plate clutch failure problem early on that was attributed to circlips fracturing because of engine harmonics, the same clutch was in several other cars without issue.
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Your issues have been one of the reasons I’ve tempered my lust for an early 6 speed Challenger.
Are the newer 6 speeds any better than your 2010?
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IIRC it was mainly a model year 2009-2010 issue, something to do with the input shaft having the wrong grease and/or too much grease so that the clutch discs couldn’t slide freely and come out of contact with the driving side of the mechanism after the grease got too stiff from heat cycles / clutch wear / aging. Going from some of the peoples’ stories it looks like there were changes after 2010 where the older parts actually went out of production and had to be updated to the newer style if they were being replaced.
I’ve driven Hellcats with both a manual and automatic transmissions.
I’ll take an automatic, please.
The stick is still the proper way of doing even if it has a ton of cons about it.
It’s not the “deep north” that develops patina, and the salted roads of the mid-north only create cancer. Good patina is indeed made in Arizona, but unfortunately takes about 40 or 50 years.
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I agree, I’d put that level of patina at least that old, but I remember a friend’s car with late-70s metallic paint that had pretty extensive ‘sunburn’ on every horizontal surface in 25 years. Lucky UV light only affects cars no people right?
I have over 30 years experience in making cars look old. True fact. My Triumph TR7 was only 10 years old when I bought it, but less than a year later it looked 20 years old as it was towed away to the scrapyard. Been honing my skillz ever since.
I know I shouldn’t fall into old stereotypes but when I first saw that rusty looking Hellcat, my instinctive reaction was,
“Gee, I knew Fiat was running Chrysler these days but I didn’t think they’d taken over that completely…” https://uploads.disquscdn.com/images/7af947b32a578716b22fbbdb8065cc7c2f6104636832a74a6234d7793d0463bd.jpg
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