2016 Dodge Challenger Srt Hellcat Coupe 2-door on 2040-cars

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Chrysler investing $20M in Toledo plant to support 9-speed auto production

In 2011, Chrysler announced a $72-million investment in its Toledo Machining Plant to modernize production of the eight- and nine-speed torque-converters for automatic transmissions made there. That upgrade work won't be finished until Q3 of this year, but Chrysler has already announced a further $19.6-million investment to increase production capacity for the nine-speeders.
The extra units will be necessary because the nine-speed transmission they'll be mated to is going into three popular models: it will debut on the 2014 Jeep Cherokee, then go into the Chrysler 200 and Dodge Dart. The company predicted that this year alone it would sell 200,000 units equipped with the nine-speed tranny, and it is spending some $374 million in addition to the investment in Toledo to upgrade production capacity for it.
The work attached to this new investment won't begin until Q3 of 2014, and it will be finished by the end of that year. There's a press release below with all the details.

Cruise Woodward Avenue with Autoblog's Dodge Challenger Hellcat

While Autoblog was consumed by coverage of the increasingly important Monterey Car Week last weekend, there was another big even going on. The Woodward Dream Cruise is significantly lighter in terms of news, but there's no denying that it's a far bigger, and far more egalitarian than what the wine-and-cheese crowd experience on the links at Pebble Beach. The Dream Cruise crams tens of thousands of cars and over a million spectators along a four-lane ribbon of asphalt between Ferndale and Pontiac, MI. What's remarkable aren't these numbers, though, so much as the distances they travel. Owners and admirers come from far and wide, across the United States and in some cases across the globe, to take in the spectacle. This year, local radio and television coverage featured fans that traveled from Japan, Australia, and Europe, just to take in the cruise. Of course, we realize that not everyone can make the pilgrimage to Woodward Avenue. With that fact in mind, we decided to bring a bit of the Dream Cruise to Autoblog with a time-lapse video of the cruise route. You can experience the good (a Lamborghini Gallardo, Chevrolet Chevelle, and Oldsmobile Cutlass 442), the bad (the traffic jams), and the ugly (no, your 2003 Ford Focus does not qualify as a classic, get the hell out of the cruiser lanes). So join us, as we turn off 8 Mile Road behind the wheel of our 2015 Dodge Challenger SRT Hellcat and run north, through Ferndale, Pleasant Ridge, Royal Oak, Huntington Woods, Berkley, Bloomfield Township, and Bloomfield Hills, before ending up on Wide Track Drive in Pontiac.

The final-year Viper special editions sold out so fast Dodge is adding more

Viper collectors don't mess around. After Dodge opened ordering for its 25th anniversary 2017 Viper models – some of the last ones that will be built – all of the cars were spoken for in just five days. The company managed to sell 206 cars, an average of about 41 per day. Compare that to the 241 Vipers sold through May of this year and you can see why special editions make good business sense. Demand was so strong that Dodge will add a sixth special-edition for the Viper's last year of production. Within the group of five initial special packages, the winner was the 1:28 Edition ACR; all 28 went in 40 minutes. Dodge sold the 31 VooDoo II Edition ACRs in two hours, while 25 Snakeskin Edition GTCs and 100 GTS-R Commemorative Edition ACRs took two days to sell out. The 22 Dodge Dealer Edition ACRs took five days – apparently the dealers were too busy taking orders for the other 184 cars they didn't have time to order their own. The additional anniversary car is called the Snakeskin ACR. Dodge will build "up to" 31 of them, which we're pretty sure means exactly 31 if the previous demand is any indicator. The count matches the 2010 run of Snakeskin ACRs and will take the final-edition total to 237. We don't have any photos of that one yet, but you can get a good idea of what it will look like from the Snakeskin GTC. This one features Snakeskin Green paint, obviously, with a custom snakeskin-patterned SRT stripe, the ACR Package, the Extreme Aero Package, carbon-ceramic brakes, the ACR interior, a serialized Snakeskin badge on the instrument panel, and a custom car cover with the owner's name by the door. It will be available to order in the middle of this month, which means it will be sold out well by the end of the month. Chances are these and many of the others will go to mega-collectors like Wayne and D'Ann Rauh of Texas, who, at last count, owned 79 Vipers. Seventy-nine. Like we said, Viper collectors don't mess around. Related Video: