Yahoo Autos 2023 Dodge Challenger Hellcat tune turns into a $36,000 repair bill
A year ago we spoke to three professional tuners, one specialist for each of The Big Three, about how to properly tune your car. While the details differed about how to structure a long-term tuning program depending on brand, a unifying theme appeared across all three interviews, especially applicable to Mopar products: Properly tuning a car costs proper money. As this cautionary tale related by Carscoops shows, fixing a broken tune also costs proper money.
The story began with the owner of a 2023 Dodge Challenger Hellcat Widebody Jailbreak, Brennon Vinet, posting on the Dodge Challenger Owner's Club page on Facebook. Vinet claimed his Hellcat engine lost compression after around 800 miles of driving and needed a new engine and transmission. He said he'd never driven over 100 miles per hour, never abused the car, never had anything done to the engine, saying the only modification was the popular mid-muffler delete, which removes a set of mufflers in the middle of the exhaust piping.
His Facebook posts show Dodge denied the warranty claim, the automaker "alleging that [Vinet] altered the ECM." He somehow got the situation escalated far enough up the chain that he said he spoke to brand CEO Tim Kuniskis and VP Steve Stander, neither one of whom reversed Dodge's position on the claim. The refusals left Vinet with a bill for $36,000 if he wanted his car fixed.
