5 Most Ridiculous Hellephant Engine Swap Candidates
Hellephant. It's a term that was introduced to the world at the 2018 SEMA show in Las Vegas, Nevada, and it describes the latest in a long line of absurd supercharged engines offered by SRT, Fiat-Chrysler's horsepower-obsessed high performance division. With a whopping 1,000hp and 950 lb-ft on tap from a 426 ci V8, it's the blown crate motor of any muscle car maniac's dreams—and it comes with a full factory warranty.
Those gobs and gobs of grunt, sitting right there in an easily accessible package, got us thinking: Where would we put the Hellephant if we were building the world's most ridiculous, least-likely thousand-horsepower hot rod?
Check out what our addled imaginations came up with on this list of Hellephant transplants guaranteed to stop your heart—or at the very least, crack you up.
1. Jeep Wrangler
How many years now have Jeep fans been clamoring for some kind of Hemi under the hood of the market's most popular rock-crawler? Come on, Chrysler, why not skip both the 5.7 and the Hellcat engines and step right up to the Hellephant! The only thing better than tackling the Rubicon from behind the wheel of a Wrangler is doing it Superman-style as your launch your 4x4 from one boulder to another using the majestic, almost impossibly-concentrated torque potential of the Hellephant's might being fed out through ultra-low creeper gearing.
2. Chevrolet Corvair Monza
What was that old Ralph Nader line about "unsafe at any speed?" It's time to take the consumer pundit's anti-automobile hyperbole and, um, make it completely true by stuffing the Hellephant in the trunk of the closest Chevrolet Corvair Monza you can find. To make things even more exciting, we're going to stick with the first-gen and its swing axle. Actually, let's see how much throttle we have to apply before the entire rear suspension shears off the car and achieves a stable orbit around the moon. We're guessing 25 percent.
3. Volvo 240 Wagon
How could we forget the world's most popular swap candidate? While you could theoretically throw any Volvo wagon under the Hellephant bus, we've chosen the rectangular Volvo 245 for maximum sleeper potential. Of course, the word 'sleeper' is a flexible one when the 25-year-old grocery getter sitting at the light beside you is vibrating with enough force to rattle the change in your own center console, but trust us, no one will ever see the Volvo-phant coming. Plus, all that extra cargo area gives you plenty of room to install a second and third fuel tank for cross-country Cannonball runs.
4. Ford Festiva HELLEPHANTgun
Way back when, in a world where topping 200hp was considered epic from an OEM, someone took the small-displacement V6 from a Ford Taurus SHO and stuffed it behind the front seats of a Ford Festiva. Thus was born the SHOgun, a pint-sized monster that was so fun to drive Jay Leno keeps one of the few existing examples in his garage.
Honestly though, that's child's play compared to the HELLEPHANTgun, a Festiva that asks you to slide your seat up—allllll the way up—because there's a 1,000hp supercharged V8 sitting just behind your head, and you don't want your hair to be set on fire by the heat of its exhaust system. Or maybe you do, because honestly, the survival rate for anyone driving a 2,000 pound car with that much output pretty much approaches zero as soon as you turn the key in the ignition.
5. The Duellephant
What, exactly, is the Duellephant? Is it a late-'60s Oldsmobile Toronado with one Hellephant engine up front and another out back, connected via a common throttle linkage and what can only loosely be described as "four-wheel drive?" Or is it a classic Duesenberg Model J with a pair of Hellephant motors stacked in-line with each other, threatening to tear a hole in the space/time continuum with each gentle graze of your right foot on the loud pedal?
Either way, it sounds like you'll have to lie to insurance company.
