Performance car and truck sales are on a tear in the U.S.
Despite ever-tightening emissions laws and fuel economy requirements, sales of high-performance models in the U.S. have outpaced global growth since the teeth of the recession in 2009, according to Dave Pericak, director of Ford Performance.
"Performance vehicle sales around the world continue to grow -- with sales up 70 percent in the United States and 14 percent in Europe since 2009," Pericak said.
Demand for some vehicles is so white hot that automakers can't keep up: Dodge recently announced it was suspending new orders for its 707-hp Challenger and Charger Hellcat models until it could validate orders and fulfill its backlog. And at the New York auto show, traditionally a bastion of luxury car reveals, automakers touted performance models in virtually every segment, from the affordable Ford Focus RS to the new McLaren 570S supercar.
It's not just a desire for magazine covers and 0-to-60 bragging rights driving this trend; automakers and analysts say performance cars are good business. They offer fat profit margins and draw different, younger buyers who can spend more, and they cast a high-performance halo on an automaker's more prosaic offerings.
These models also can serve as highly motivating "passion projects" for engineers and as test beds for technologies. As Pericak put it, Ford has a heritage of performance models that "serve the much larger, far more important goal -- which is to drive innovation throughout our entire company."
Tim Kuniskis, head of Dodge and SRT, says the Hellcat models have wildly exceeded expectations, with 9,000 orders placed as of mid-March, when order-taking was suspended.
"Both of them have been on fire," Kuniskis said. "We're up over 90 percent on those cars [since the crisis]. If you look at Charger, we're up about 90 percent. If you look at Challenger, we're up 95 percent at retail.
"We saw this a long time ago, and that's why we started to move in this direction."