As it is, Dodge doesn’t need a pickup. Ever since the 1500 and HD lineups were spun off into Ram Trucks, Dodge transitioned to “America’s performance brand” thanks to the likes of the Viper, Hellcat, and Demon.
Despite this rather successful switch from a working man’s brand to muscled-up vehicles, some people still dream of the Dodge logo on a pickup truck. Pixel artist Kleber Silva is one of them, and thanks to the magic of Photoshop, the Charger Hellcat has been reimagined as a unibody workhorse.
The Hellcat and SRT logos need no explaining, and obviously enough, the front and rear fascias are lifted straight off the full-size sedan. As far as the side profile is concerned, the Fiat Strada with the dual-cab option served as inspiration for this wacky rendering. “What exactly is a Strada,” you ask?
Also sold as the Ram 700 in places like Mexico, the subcompact trucklet is the commercial vehicle derivative of the Fiat Argo with a little bit of Mobi and Fiorino for good measure. Based on the MC-P modular platform, the Strada won’t make you go wow in terms of suck-squeeze-bang-blow either.
Developed from the get-go as a utilitarian vehicle for Central and South America, the smaller brother of the Fiat Toro can't do better than 8-valve engines with 1.3 or 1.4 liters of displacement and flex-fuel technology. Quite a difference over the supercharged HEMI of the Charger and free-breathing motors of the Ram 1500, but then again, the Strada was designed for smaller economies and different customers from those in North America.
Chrysler does have a lot of experience with utes, starting with the Plymouth Belvedere built in the 1950s in Australia for The Oz. The Dodge Rampage and badge-engineered Plymouth Scamp were offered in the U.S. with unibody chassis, but both were discontinued after two years of production over extremely poor sales compared to the body-on-frame competition.
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