With Christmas around the corner, the Dodge Challenger SRT Hellcat Redeye is the latest car to get a sleigh makeover. Introduced as part of Dodge’s “Big Finish” campaign, the Challenger SRT Hellcat Redeye Sleigh stars in a new commercial called “Upgrade” alongside retired WWE wrestler Bill Goldberg, who happens to play a pretty jacked-up Santa Claus. With muscles coming out of his ears, Santa decides to keep with the profile this holiday season by commissioning his elves to make improvements to his current sleigh. The result, as you can see, is a sleigh that’s going to make a lot of pony car enthusiasts wish they had the means to do the same thing.
"Ho, Ho, Go!"
It can’t fly, but it does feature a 6.2-liter supercharged V-8 engine that produces 797 horsepower and 707 pound-feet of torque. If the sleigh performs as well as it the muscle car does in standard form, it could sprint from 0 to 60 mph in 3.4 seconds on its way to a top speed of 203 mph. Santa Goldberg can breeze through a lot of houses at that speed, provided that he can fit through those chimneys.
Visually, the one-off sleigh looks the part of a custom creation. The roof, doors, and wheels are gone, and the windscreen has been chopped completely off. The exhausts now sit on the side while the full-scale sleigh completes the custom creation. Apparently, Dodge is serious enough about its “Big Finish” campaign that it’s prepared an entire line of merchandise centered around the campaign for the holidays. T-shirts will be sold featuring the same reindeer design logo that Dodge used on the Challenger SRT Hellcat Redeye sleigh.
In addition to the money-making merchandising scheme, Dodge will also chronicle the entire process that went into the Challenger SRT Hellcat Redeye’s evolution from muscle car to sleigh. According to the company, a “social series” will show the entire process on its YouTube channel beginning in December.
I can’t remember the last company that took great lengths to promote its sleigh creation. We’ve seen other companies showcase their sleigh concepts and renderings, but very few of them actually evolved into a real-life scale creation. Mercedes-Benz launched a sleigh configurator in 2015. Lexus showed off the Flying Luxury Cruiser in 2014. There was even a time when a Ferrari F1 race car pulled Santa’s sleigh for reasons that all of us can only shrug about.
None of them, though, created a real-scale version of their concepts. Dodge appears to have done so, or if we’re going to go along with the narrative of this campaign, the company’s elves created it with the help of the most jacked-up Santa Claus we’re ever seen. Hopefully, Santa Goldberg doesn’t lose his temper while delivering gifts to the children of the world. It would be a pity of any of those young ones get speared in the process.
Further Reading
Read our full review on the 2018 Dodge Challenger SRT Demon.
Read our full review on the 2018 Dodge Challenger.
Read our full review on the 2015 Dodge Challenger SRT Hellcat.