If there's one vehicle that seems like it probably wouldn't need a thousand
horsepower it's the Jeep Grand Cherokee. After all they already have two insanely
powerful versions. They've got the 485 horsepower SRT and they've got the 707
horsepower SRT Trackhawk. But the dudes at Hennessey have never been the sorts
of guys to say, "You know what? We don't really need this, so let's not make it." So
introducing the Jeep Grand Cherokee Trackhawk HPE 1000.
This thing makes 1012 horsepower and 969 pounds-feet of torque at the crank,
according to Hennessey, which for the record is a little bit more of both of
those than a Bugatti Veyron. It also has all-wheel drive like a
Bugatti Veyron, it has one more gear than a Bugatti Veyron -- because this has an
8-speed automatic versus a 7-speed -- so basically if Bugatti made a truck and
didn't put any luxury features in it beyond what you find in the high-end
Jeep, it would be this. Let's try a 60-mile-an-hour pull.
Jeeps can't do this this isn't right oh you know what I thought at first this
was too much power I was like you know what, who needs a thousand horsepower in
a Jeep. This is the perfect amount of power for
this car. This is what the Jeep Grand Cherokee Trackhawk should always be.
It doesn't feel like it's trying to knock you flat out on to the canvas. This thing
just feels like a regular Jeep that's just been dialed up a lot.
Now among sort of the most obvious changes they do at Hennessey in order to
turn this thing from a regular, only-mildly-insane 707 horsepower Trackhawk and
turn it into the absolutely crazytown, banana pants thousand horsepower
Hennessey performance version, the biggest thing is literally a giant
supercharger it is 4.5 liters of displacement which means it is the size
of a lot of engines in terms of just the amount of air is being shoved through.
And it's just the supercharger. That is a lot of air to be compressed and
pushed down that 6.2 liter engine. Clearly it works. Grab your socks.
Oh yeah. Houston we have liftoff.
My god I have driven some fast cars in my day, But there's nothing that's quite
as wackadoo as this thousand horsepower Jeep.
So inside, much like outside, this looks exactly like any other Jeep Grand
Cherokee SRT. John Hennessey was talking earlier with us about how the idea is to
make the builds replicable easily and also to make them, you know, look kind of
clean and to not go with a crazy super far from stock look so this car I mean
this Jeep looks almost identical to your basic Trackhawk, I mean the only
difference is that you'd notice would be the little Hennessey badges they put on
the side. And if you didn't know what those were you probably wouldn't think
twice about it. And if you drive it normally it doesn't
feel ridiculous I mean part of the nice thing about putting a thousand
horsepower into this Grand Cherokee is that you have all-wheel drive now.
Granted, the guy from Hennessey told me that this thing can still break all four
wheels loose at 30 miles an hour if you floor it, as long as you're only half way
responsible, you still can handle that pretty easily it's not going to get too
crazy the way that, you know, putting Bugatti-ish levels of power into a
rear-wheel drive Demon. The thing that really sets this car apart is it's this
combination of the sleeper looks and the hypercar power. I mean, it's a thousand
horsepower all-wheel drive thousand horsepower 969 pound-feet of torque.
Those are hypercar stats. This is a Jeep. It walks like a Jeep, talks like a Jeep --
except a little louder. But you know what? It goes like a friggin 911 Turbo.
So the engineers here have told me the best thing to do to launch this puppy
not to use actually the launch control function, which SRT does include on the
stock vehicle, but because it's got a thousand horsepower all you got to do is
pop this bad boy in and drive twist the drive mode selector to sports mode,
then your gonna tack it up tack it up to about 1500 horsepower and that should
enable you to fire off a 0 to 60 in about 2.7 seconds. So sport mode enabled...
Starting it up
Go!
Holy God Almighty
Whoa whoa. Those first two years, right out of the hole, where it just throws you
back and the nose rears up like a Chris Craft. This thing is unstoppable. There's
no fighting with Sir Isaac Newton. You can't beat the physics of trying to run
a vehicle this big that fast. When you jam on the brakes it's a little
unsettling because you've got two and a half tons of car that you're trying to
slow down as it's trying to pick up speed like a Saturn V rocket and
admittedly with the aerodynamics -- I mean it's obvious SRT has done a great job
doing what they can with this -- it's still a Flying Brick, and there's only so much
you can do to make that slip through the air and the faster you go just the way
that the physics works a bit you know -- drag increases with the square of speed --
so it makes sense as you're building speed. Once you get up past the same
highway velocities and into the areas where you normally only reach on the
Autobahn or on the drag strip so the faster you go the more that's gonna slow
you dow.n
You could just take this thing from zero to a hundred all day long just over and
over and over again and it would never get old you could sell rides to this
damn thing. It is a remarkable piece of engineering, and strapping a giant
[bleep] supercharger to an engine.