Stellantis’ high-output Hurrican twin-turbo will make more than 500 horsepower
Photo: Stellantis
Stellantis isn’t quite ready to give up internal combustion engines just yet, but it’s saying goodbye to its iconic HEMI V8 sooner rather than later. In line to take that legendary engine’s place is a new twin-turbocharged inline six-cylinder called the Hurricane. Given what it can do, one has to think there won’t be too much grumbling from purists.
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The Hurricane is a 3.0-liter twin-turbo straight six that’ll become the main engine for vehicles on the STLA Large and STLA Frame platforms. It leverages similar design elements from the 2.0-liter turbo available with the Wrangler and Cherokee and seems ideally fit for heavy hitters like the Ram 1500, Wagoneer, Jeep Grand Cherokee, and Dodge Challenger and Charger.
Stellantis says that it’ll offer the engine in standard-output and high-output variants. The SO targets better efficiency but should still eclipse 400 horsepower and 450 lb-ft of torque. The HO? Ho-boy, it’s a doozy. We’re looking at 500 horsepower plus and more than 475 lb-ft of torque as well as “significant fuel economy during heavy use, such as towing.”
Even eclipsing the numbers of the 392 HEMI, the Hurricane twin-turbo should be about 15 percent more efficient. Both should also be plenty smooth, getting at least 90 percent of peak torque at 2,350 rpm all the way up to redline.
“The Hurricane twin-turbo is a no-compromise engine that delivers better fuel economy and an important reduction in greenhouse gases without asking our customers to give up performance,” said Stellantis’ head of propulsion systems, Micky Bly.
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Photo: Stellantis
Bly added that the Hurricane twin-turbo lines up with plans for a 50 percent all-electric sales mix by 2030. It also aligns with the goal of cutting Stellantis’s carbon footprint by 50 percent by the end of the decade.
Short of pairing the Hurricane with a plug-in hybrid system ala the 2.0-liter turbo in the Wrangler 4xe and Grand Cherokee 4xe, there’s no immediate replacement for the supercharged HEMIs offered with SRT models. More likely, those V8s will be moved out by all-electric powertrains somewhere down the line.
The first vehicles with the Hurricane twin-turbo should pop up sometime later this year. As for what those vehicles will be and what will become of HEMI (and, for that matter, the Pentastar V6)? We’ll just have to see how the cookie crumbles.
Kyle S. Johnson lives in Cincinnati, a city known by many as “the Cincinnati of Southwest Ohio.” He enjoys professional wrestling, Halloween, and also other things. He has been writing for a while, and he plans to continue to write well into the future. See more articles by Kyle.
