2005 Dodge Charger and Dodge Viper

Let's say your vehicular shopping list calls for a pricey topless bauble with a Le Mans pedigree, something to tow said bauble with, and a small, cheap, and cheerful runabout for everyday use. Naturally, your lead-foot proclivities demand that each of the above be capable of 100-plus-mph quarter-mile trap speeds. You'll surely have to tote your suitcase full of big bills all over town visiting one snooty import brand after another, right? Au contraire! Your friendly local Dodge dealer can hook you up with all of the above and maybe even talk you into a Hemi V-8-powered wagon or sport/utility (if you can bend that quarter-mile threshold just a smidge). One-stop shopping--how convenient.

Clearly, Dodge is on a mission to achieve top-of-mind status when buyers think performance. Slowly but surely, over the last few years the Ram brand has set about introducing a model in each of its series that can run right at the front of its competitive set. There's the Neon SRT4 that currently rules the sportcompact roost running easy 5.5-second sprints to 60 mph for just $21,195. The Viper roadster tops the lineup, easily laying down 12-second 120-mph quarter-mile times--by our reckoning that makes it the best off-the-shelf performance buy for under six figures (for the moment). And in between those extremes, the bad-ass Magnum RT Hemi wagon and Viper-powered Ram SRT10 pickup rule their respective roosts.

To that roster of top-performing cojone-mobiles prepare to welcome two more: a killer four-door sedan and a club-race-ready aero-tuned 200-mph Viper coupe. Let's start with the sedan.

Charger.

The name conjures potent images of either the "Bullitt" bad guys or Beau and Luke Duke driving wildly in a slab-sided two-door fastback based on the mid-1960s midsize Coronet. A generation of car nuts loves that car, so before anyone's seen or spun tires in the real thing, the name has already earned Chrysler sacks of hate mail. "How dare you denigrate the hallowed Charger name by applying it to a four-door!?" the faithful rant. Okay, maybe it is a risky moniker, but understand that while the 1999 Charger concept car openly strived to reinterpret the General Lee as a modern four-door, this car looks forward, not back.

Its designers were tasked with penning a fashion-forward sedan with a look and personality utterly distinct from its LX platformmates, the 300 and Magnum. That's no small challenge, given that the team also was ordered to reuse nearly all the 300 sedan parts that don't get washed or waxed. Indeed, only the windshield and the shape of the A-pillars are shared between the 300 and Charger.