Like a Bat Out of Hellephant: The Story of One Insane Engine
One engine that joins the Gemera in the 1000 hp+ club is made by the motor parts company Mopar. Read on to learn more about the monstrous Hellephant engine.
Car nerds love upping the engine ante. Not satisfied with reasonable horsepower, they search out higher and higher numbers, zooming in their supercars at unsafe speeds.
The very beautiful, very expensive Koenigsegg Gemera comes in at 1,700 horsepower. By contrast, a typical sedan averages somewhere in the 300s. One engine that joins the Gemera in the 1000 hp+ club is made by the
Read on to learn more about the monstrous Hellephant engine.
Crate expectations
Born as an antifreeze company in 1937, Mopar evolved into a parts and services company that caters to the most avid auto fans. Among its offerings are stand-alone engines, sometimes called crate engines. These engines are ideal for people who want to retrofit their classic cars, because they come all put together in one box—hence “crate.”
Mopar’s crate engines are, by and large, ridiculously powerful. The word “supercharged” is sprinkled liberally throughout the catalog, and it appears to be apt: they claim that 50-year-old cars and older could be fitted with one of their crate engines and experience a 700 hp awakening. This is a tempting offer for anyone with an old-school garage.
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Crate engines are as varied and interesting as the vehicles they serve, but there is one that causes a bit of a frenzy.
The elusive Hellephant engine from Mopar is a 426-cubic-inch all-aluminum beast. It offers at least 1,000 hp to its lucky customer, and it’s based on a previous engine called the Hellcat Hemi, reports
. It made its debut in 2018, but some company changes and a delay that faded into the start of a pandemic made the Hellephant into a rare bird indeed.
MotorTrend notes that buyers with $30,000 and their wits about them in the spring of 2019 were lucky enough to take a stab at obtaining one, but the engine sold out in just two days. Owners are as hard to find as the Hellephants themselves.
Following the herd
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Luckily, YouTube gave MotorTrend some breadcrumbs.
unveils a Hellephant crate engine in a June 2020 video, running it in a parked Dodge SRT as the camera pans round and round.
The noise of the engine is indeed hellish, and it’s torture to see the car idle. Three weeks later Demonology breaks the tension by taking the Dodge to a drag race track, where they rev it up repeatedly and then send it screaming down the lane. It looks ready to compete at NHRA Nationals.
Other Hellephants have emerged slowly, but with an initial production run that only apparently yielded about 100 units, eBay was the place to go to hunt down an elusive Hellephant for much of 2020 and 2021. Luckily, it looks like the tide is turning: the 426 Hellephant Supercharged HEMI V8 crate engine is now prominently featured on the Mopar website.
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