At a Cars and Coffee meet in Loveland, Colorado, a Dodge Challenger Hellcat driver decided to let loose the full power of the car’s supercharged 6.2-liter V-8. What happens next won’t surprise most car enthusiasts. Maybe a few hundred feet from where the driver opens up the throttle, the rear tires lose traction and the Challenger SRT Hellcat lurches to the left—right into the side of an unsuspecting Chevrolet Silverado 1500 passing by. The truck is pushed off the road, digs in, and flips over, eventually landing on its roof, gently teetering fore and aft.
You can see it all unfold in the video above, which also is making the rounds on social media. Luckily, no one was seriously injured as a result of the accident. A local news outlet, the Loveland Reporter-Herald reported that “one person was transported to a local hospital with what Loveland Fire Rescue Authority Capt. Mark Lyons described as minor injuries.”
The Loveland Reporter-Herald also notes that the driver of the Hellcat was ticketed for reckless driving. In Colorado, reckless driving is a misdemeanor offense. First-time offenders can face fines between $150 and $300 and may have to serve up to 90 days of jail time. With further violations, however, the fines and jail times grow much steeper.
Sights like this are never what you want to see, common though they may seem outside of a Cars and Coffee events. (Insert a joke about oversteering Ford Mustangs here—but, obviously, the Blue Oval lacks a monopoly on customers with poor judgment and too much horsepower.) Worse, clearly there are bystanders around who could have been seriously injured by the wayward Challenger. It just goes to show that you need to treat cars like the Dodge with respect, and if you want to drive fast, take your Hellcat to a track and get it out of your system before you or someone else gets hurt. It might sound like common sense, but clearly some people still need to hear it.
