Every year Jeep creates seven concept offroad trucks and reveals them at the Easter Jeep Safari. The same happened this year as well, but now, at the height of muscle car craze, the guys from FCA did one thing every Jeep enthusiast really wanted to see – they have put a Hellcat engine in a Wrangler. Yes, we have it now and it is called the Jeep Trailcat. A tame name considering the insane power of its Hellcat sourced engine.
As you all probably know, Jeep is in the middle of creating the Jeep Grand Cherokee Hellcat so the fact that they gave us the Trailcat to think about is rather surprising. With its green and black two-tone livery, the machine is built around the three-door convertible Wrangler. Honestly, we do not know how did they make all this work since the FCA is even struggling to put the Hellcat engine in a Grand Cherokee because they need a much more powerful transmission and an all wheel drive. This is such a huge problem in fact, that the FCA actually rigged a six-speed manual in the Trailcat.
However, we won’t deal with these things right now – the Trailcat is a machine which promises a lot and we like it. The 30-second video does not show us a lot, but it does show that the Trailcat sounds like a really, really angry cat. 6.2 liters of pure American “V eightness” is rumbling underneath the bonnet. It is fair to assume that there cannot be a better present for the 50th anniversary of the annual Easter Safari festival in Moab, Utah.
At the end of the day, the Trailcat is a fairly amazing vehicle. Despite its connection with the Hellcat, it boasts Dana 60 axles at both ends, a two-inch lift and beefy 39.5-inch BFGoodrich Krawler T/A tires. This definitely is a lot of stuff for the Wrangler to handle. It will be a looker on the Safari.
