Leave it to Jeep to drop a 707 hp supercharged V8 engine into an SUV. The Trackhawk begins with the excellent underpinnings of a Grand Cherokee, but quickly becomes its own entity under Jeep’s SRT care.

The Trackhawk is right at home on a racetrack, but it is also a great daily driver and grand touring vehicle. Car Talk’s team was lucky enough to try the Trackhawk in all of these situations. We were not just impressed, but in awe. The Trackhawk is definitive proof that Jeep is a brand built on three pillars: Performance, luxury, and utility.

Forget everything you think you know about how an SUV can handle. The folks at SRT built the Grand Cherokee to corner like a sports car and sprint like a muscle car. From a distance, the Trackhawk has the profile of a typical SUV, but up close, any racer can spot all of the signs of a hot rod.

The Trackhawk was built from 2018 to 2021 and played at a price point where the European performance automakers felt like they owned the place. We’re betting that once they saw the Trackhawk, it left no doubt in their minds whether American-branded companies could move their cheese.

As well as being a fantastic track-day or grand touring vehicle, the Trackhawk is right at home when asked to drop the kids off at school, run for supplies at the home improvement center, or pick your business partner up at the airport. It even has a snow mode!

If you are looking for a Grand Cherokee Trackhawk because of its engine, look no further than the 2023 Durango SRT Hellcat. It has the supercharged V8 engine with 710 hp you are looking for. We’ve driven the Durango SRT Hellcat (on road) and found that it offers much of the same thrill the Trackhawk did but in a slightly longer package. The interior is scrumptious. Microfiber suede everywhere, a fantastic infotainment system, and much the same feel we remember from the Trackhawk. The Durango SRT Hellcat starts at around $98K, and there are three trims, including Premium, for which a budget of around $115K will be required (not including any dealer markups). In our on-road testing, the Durango SRT Hellcat provided the same spine tingle that the Trackhawk did.

You need not leave the Stallantis family to find a more modern and luxurious SUV as quick as the Jeep Trackhawk. The 2024 Alfa Romeo Stelvio Quadrifoglio has a turbocharged V6 with “just” 505 hp, but it has proven it can sprint from 0-60 MPH as fast as the Trackhawk. At under $100K, this is a model that is hard to ignore. We spent a few hours cruising around in Miami with the Stelvio and became believers that there is actually a replacement for displacement.

If you have a budget between $120K and $200K, Range Rover’s 2024 Sport offers power close to what the Jeep Trackhawk has. With its 626 hp twin-turbocharged V8, it can hit 0-60 MPH in about 3.7 seconds. That is just a couple of tenths of a second from what a Trackhawk will run. The Range Rover also has all of the on-track high-performance kit to make it turn and stop. Sure, the price is double that of a Trackhawk, but you can order one today if you wish. Jaguar Land Rover also offers the F-Pace with a supercharged 524 hp V8 that is just as quick. It may be a bit less expensive than the Range Rover Sport.

We’ve focused our comparison models on gas-powered vehicles, but most Californians who want to own stupid fast “SUVs” opt for the Tesla Model Y Performance priced around $60K. Not quick enough? Tesla can build you a Model X with over 1,000 hp that will beat pretty much any SUV in a stoplight race. The X Plaid can sprint from 0-60 MPH in under 3 seconds, and you can buy one for around $100K. We have not tested the X Plaid, but we have a hunch it doesn't have the snow mode the Trackhawk does, and we haven’t seen any Model Ys passing Grand Cherokees at Moab.

Any Jeep Trackhawk you find will be used, so the market is setting the price today. We found 2018 Trackhawks with about 50K miles on sale for under $70K. Newer 2021 Trackhawks with less than 10K miles are selling for around $85K - $90K right now (and may still be covered under the powertrain warranty!) These prices are in line with the MSRP of the Trackhawk when it was on sale brand new. There has been almost no depreciation, but they have not started to leap in price as collector vehicles - yet.

We had the opportunity of a lifetime to test the 2018 Jeep Trackhawk shortly after it debuted in October 2018. We lapped the private course at the Monticello Motor Club in New York during a press event. Fortunately, your tester had experience driving near-supercars such as Dodge Vipers on this course many times, along with sports cars like Corvettes, Nissan GT-Rs, BMW M3s, and other big-power track cars. We expected the Trackhawk to be more ponderous and slower than the coupe Challenger and sedan Charger Hellcats we had tracked. We were wrong on both counts.

The Trackhawk is all-wheel drive. None of the vehicles we rattled off in an undisguised effort to impress you are all-wheel drive. That meant the Trackhawk could put power down coming out of corners better than any of those impressive vehicles. The way the course is set up for media has a downhill leading to a hairpin turn that then leads to a long uphill straightaway. All of the sports cars do pretty well in that corner, but in my hands, the Challenger and Charger would always invoke traction control and limit my uphill dash to under 100 MPH. The Trackhawk, by contrast, would bite the asphalt with all four wheels and leap ahead as soon as it was 60% around the bend. My glance at the speedometer indicated 110 MPH at the top of the hill.

In corners, the lowered and stiffly-sprung Trackhawk was almost shockingly adept. It was easy to drift it a bit sideways if one had the intestinal fortitude. If you watch our video link below, you will see that the driver does allow the vehicle to slide sideways a bit on many of the corners. Imagine doing this in an SUV!

The brakes of the Trackhawk were like the hand of Gawd when you needed to brake hard into a corner. Our own testing was limited to single laps at a time, not a long series of laps. However, the brakes never faded after a day of this one-hot-lap-at-a-time abuse.

One of the most impressive features of the Trackhawk is, of course, its big-displacement V8 being force-fed air by a belted supercharger. However, the transmission is equally impressive. The two work together very well. In track mode, the transmission upshifts are like rifle cracks. Rev-matched downshifts are like the snap of a finger, and the transmission is ideally tuned to the mode in which you are driving. Listen to the shits in the video link. It will make you all tingly if you are into this stuff.

Watch Patrick Rall, Hellcat owner, racer, and expert navigate a road course in the Trackhawk.

The special Jeep Trackhawk version of the Grand Cherokee was never tested by IIHS or NHTSA. However, the more vanilla versions were. The 2018-2021 Grand Cherokee never did well on the small frontal overlap tests IIHS conducted. The 2020 Jeep Grand Cherokee AWD earned five stars in NHTSA testing.

The Trackhawk was more or less hand-crafted by the folks from SRT. Overall, Hellcat-engine-equipped cars have a good reputation for durability. The Trackhawk is, at its core, a Jeep with a very special Dodge engine inside. In the 2023 J.D. Power Dependability Study, Dodge scored well above average, and Jeep scored around average. Both brands scored much higher than Porsche, Mercedes-Benz, Jaguar, and Land Rover.

We looked back to the 2020 Jeep Trackhawk configurator and found there were luxury options available, but every Trackhawk had 100% of its performance equipment standard. There was a CommandView dual-pane panoramic sunroof, a Laguna leather sport seat package that replaced the Nappa/Suede seats, and a Harman Kardon 19-speaker, 825-watt high-performance sound system. A Trailer-tow Group IV package was also an option. Wheels and tires were all 20-inch, but various rims and tires were fitted. What you find on sale will be what you get, but each of these option packages was likely added to most Trackhawks. A BlueRay rear-seat entertainment package was also an option, and hopefully, if you find a Trackhawk to buy, it won’t have that.

Jeep covers the Grand Cherokee with a three-year/36,000-mile limited warranty and a five-year/60,000-mile powertrain warranty. If the Trackhawk you are considering has seen a lot of racetrack time, we suggest that you check with your local dealer before relying on the standard warranty.

• Basic: 3 years / 36k miles
• Powertrain: 5 years / 50k miles
• Jeep offers extended warranties for certified pre-owned cars
• There are 8 SUVs with the same or better warranties than the Jeep Wrangler
• If buying used, look at our Best Extended Car Warranty Companies

Used Trackhawks may appreciate as time passes. We suspect the Trackhawk will be a collector’s favorite in years to come. It melds the two modern collector categories into one; Performance and SUV. We found dozens of used Trackhawks for sale, so they are out there if one wants to seek out a Trackhawk.

If ever there was a more ideal Certified Pre-Owned vehicle than the Jeep Trackhawk, we can’t think of one. Any powertrain warranty is a big bonus for those shopping Trackhawk used. If you are considering an aftermarket warranty, ensure the company will write a contract for a Trackhawk.

Model Note: A Grand Cherokee SRT is not a Trackhawk. It may be a great vehicle, but it does not have the same engine and transmission. In our story, we mention the SRT group multiple times and do not want our readers to misunderstand the term. SRT is part of the name of some models, and it is also the abbreviation used for a group of designers, engineers, and builders within Stellantis that works on specialty high-performance models. SRT stands for street and racing technology

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