LOL, lots of Hellcat owners are mid-life crisis owners too. Let's face it, any desirable car can be a mid-life crisis car since the whole point is to buy something that you realize you might not get a chance to buy again and never could before. I'm just going to be honest, no matter how much Hellcat owners try to spin it, they just don't attract attention like the C8 does, some of it is because the C8 looks like an exotic, some of it is that the Hellcat has been around since 2015, its a bit long in the tooth for most people. Don't get me wrong, they're still selling quite well, but its typically the people that were late to the game to buy one. The vast majority of 2015-2017 owners have long sold their cars and moved on.
I don't mean this as an insult, but I'm going to call the "normal" non-car people "peasants." The peasants don't know the difference between a Redeye and an SXT, or if a C8 is a Chevy or a Ferrari. I've taken the C8 to a drive-thru and had half the kitchen staff came to the window and asked why a Ferrari is getting a cheeseburger.
Now, the C8 is popular with the peasants because a lot of them have no idea it's a Corvette. So long as they think it's a Ferrari, it's all good. Same with the Hellcat. If you put a godawful side Hellcat graphic on the car, the peasants will think you're cool too. That's because they like Hellcats, not because they know what one looks like, but because they've seen enough shenanigans on YT to understand that it's badass. They just see the midengine C8 as an exotic car that costs big money. In reality, they're not cheap, but mine was 15k cheaper than the Redeye (if it ever actually shows up). It's most definitely not an exotic. Mine is about as reliable as an Aston-Martin, that's about as exotic as it really is. It performs 9/10ths of a full exotic, which is nice, but it's not what 90% of people think it is.
Now, if Dodge had the production capacity to build double or triple the amount of Hellcats and Redeyes, they'd probably sell just as well as the C8 does. IMO, the C8 sells as it does because it looks like a Ferrari and because the Corvette has a diehard fandom the same way the Mustang has. The Corvette has been in production since 1953. The Hellcat has only been around since 2015. It's always going to have that diehard core support. This doesn't mean the Hellcat can't sell as well, but Dodge would have had to scale the production up... which at that volume, would have made them even less expensive. If the C8 were only a 5,000 - 8,000 unit car, the base MSRP would be a lot more expensive. I know the 2023 MY for the Hellcat is special, but they've practically sold all of them and it is only the 1st week of January. If they had enough to load up dealership lots, they'd sell those too.
