Steering wheel of a Jeep Grand Cherokee SRT
Stellantis has reportedly assured the future of the SRT division after reports emerged this past weekend that the famed in-house performance moniker had been dropped from the company’s books.
On Saturday (13 February), the Mopar Insiders online forum reported that the merger venture between the PSA Group and Fiat-Chrysler Automobiles (FCA) had resulted in the engineering division of SRT being combined with that of Stellantis itself, which, according to a spokeswoman, would “have the two-way benefit of ensuring that our brands’ SRT and performance-focused product offerings continue to meet the highest quality standards and expectations while delivering key learnings from motorsports and other high-performance-technology applications”.
Introduced in 2004 as a performance designation for Dodge and Chrysler vehicles after being established in 1989 as a development project known as Team Viper that lead to the creation of the Dodge Viper two years later, the division became known as Speciality Vehicle Engineering or SVE in 1997 before being renamed once again to Performance Vehicle Operations (PVO) during the DaimlerChrysler era in 2002.
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As indicated, it adopted the SRT or Street Racing Technology designation in 2004 until 2012 when it followed Ram in becoming a standalone brand. This didn’t last long either and since 2014, it has reverted back to a development exercise that resulted in the now discontinued SRT instead of Dodge branded Viper, the Dodge Challenger and Charger SRT, Hellcat and Demon, the Jeep Grand Cherokee SRT and more recently, the Grand Cherokee Trackhawk, Dodge Durango SRT Hellcat and the Ram 1500 TRX.
In a statement to MotorTrend, Stellantis stated that while SRT’s engineering team would indeed be absorbed into its global operations, all those involved will be retained and continue to produce SRT branded models which, if recent reports are anything to go by, will adopt electrification as opposed to relaying solely on big displacement supercharged or turbocharged V6 and V8 engines.
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