Dodge traces engine failures in 345 Demon 170s to a bad batch of crankshaft dampers

Dodge has traced a string of engine failures in its 1,025-horsepower Challenger SRT Demon 170 to a specific supplier batch of crankshaft vibration dampers, and the company says 345 of the roughly 3,300 Demon 170s it built need the part replaced. The company is notifying owners by mail and assigning each one a customer assistance advocate, and it is telling them not to drive the car to the dealership once they get the notice.

Dodge brand chief executive Matt McAlear disclosed the details to MoparInsiders, describing a defect that traces back to fasteners on the crankshaft damper rather than the damper itself failing outright. The company says the fasteners from certain supplier production batches can loosen over time, and continued driving after that starts risks damage severe enough to reach the engine’s front timing chain cover.

How Dodge narrowed the defect to 345 cars

According to autoevolution’s reporting on the notice, the automaker built about 3,300 units of the limited-run Demon 170 for the 2023 model year, meaning the affected population represents roughly one in ten of every car produced. The company says it identified the 345 suspect vehicles by tracing engine failure reports back to the supplier batches that produced the faulty damper fasteners, then cross-referencing those batches against build records to isolate exactly which VINs received the bad parts. Owners can check their own vehicle’s status through Mopar’s online VIN lookup tool, which lists the issue under its customer service notice section rather than under a recall listing.

That distinction matters. Dodge has classified the campaign as a customer service notice, not a National Highway Traffic Safety Administration safety recall, which means no federal campaign number has been assigned to it. The company told MoparInsiders it received reports of “several engine failures” tied to the loosening fasteners, and McAlear, who leads the brand as its chief executive, has described the worst-case outcome for an affected car as catastrophic engine damage if the vehicle keeps running after the damper starts to fail.

Dodge’s instructions to Demon 170 owners

Dodge is directing owners of the 345 affected cars not to drive them to a dealership once the abnormal engine compartment noise associated with the defect appears, and instead to arrange transport. The company is covering towing costs up to $250 in each direction, and it says the repair itself, replacing the crankshaft damper bolt and the damper assembly with new part numbers, takes about an hour of labor plus additional dealership processing time, for roughly two hours total. Because the fix is performed from underneath the car, dealers do not need to remove the front fascia to complete it, which Dodge has cited as one reason it expects the campaign to move quickly once parts are available.

Coverage from Carscoops and Autoblog both frame the notice as unusually direct for a company that builds one of the most powerful production muscle cars ever sold in the United States, given that the Demon 170’s supercharged 6.2-liter V8 is tuned to produce its headline horsepower figure on E85 fuel. A damper failure at that output level, at highway speed, carries a different risk profile than the same failure in a lower-output vehicle, which is part of why Dodge is treating the transport-only instruction as a firm recommendation rather than a suggestion.

The Demon 170’s supercharged 6.2-liter Hemi V8 was tuned to produce its 1,025-horsepower peak specifically on E85 fuel, a figure Dodge marketed at launch as the highest of any factory production car sold in the United States. That output is also why the crankshaft, and everything bolted to it, sits under far more stress than in a standard Hellcat-powered Challenger, giving a loosened damper fastener less margin before it turns into the kind of failure Dodge is now moving to head off in the field.

A limited-run car built for one year only

The Challenger SRT Demon 170 was Dodge’s send-off performance variant before the brand discontinued the gas-powered Challenger lineup, built in a single, deliberately capped production run for the 2023 model year. That scarcity is part of why a defect touching roughly ten percent of the run has drawn attention beyond typical service-bulletin coverage: with only about 3,300 examples built worldwide, 345 units represents a meaningful share of every Demon 170 in circulation rather than a rounding error inside a larger sales volume.

Dodge has not said how many of the 345 cars have already been repaired or transported to dealers as of this week, nor has it disclosed the specific supplier whose production batches produced the faulty fasteners. The company’s public statements so far have focused on the remedy process rather than on naming the parts supplier or detailing how many field failures preceded the notice, leaving open questions about whether additional Demon 170s outside the initial 345 could later be added to the campaign as more failure data comes in.

This article was produced with the assistance of AI and reviewed by Morning Overview editors prior to publication.

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