Earlier this week, we brought you the story of an active duty American soldier who had been done dirty by a dealership in trying to buy a 2023 Dodge Challenger SRT Demon 170. That story spread across social media like wildfire during Christmas week, leading to my discussion on New Year’s Day with both Dodge boss Tim Kuniskis and the soldier himself. Of course, the story ends up with a positive result, as Kuniskis stepped in and found a way for that soldier to get his ideal Demon 170 after dealing with a tremendous headache through his dealership.
While we got loads of information on how Tim Kuniskis and the Dodge team fixed this for the soldier, it was unclear at first how this story had spread across the internet so quickly. Shortly after publishing our piece on the 2nd, we received a handful of comments that the story had been broken by YouTuber Butter Da Insider. After looking through a collection of groups, we saw that every discussion about the initial story led back to his video, making it clear that his channel was the catalyst that brought this story to the surface. Seeing that, I reached out to Butter Da Insider for more details on his viral video.
When Butter Da Insider got up on Christmas morning, he checked social media and found that, as is generally the case, he had been tagged in scored of posts overnight, but one stuck out to him. A friend of his had tagged him in a post about a soldier who was deployed overseas who had found leading up to Christmas that the Dodge Challenger SRT Demon 170 that he ordered earlier had been sold out from under him. Sadly, this has happened to a great many people (including Butter himself), and seeing this happen to a member of the military struck a nerve with the popular YouTuber. He began gathering information from the posts and then the people involved, and on December 26th, he published his first video on this subject.
When he got up the next morning and checked his YouTube channel, he saw that the video detailing the shady business practices had blown up big time. It had gotten thousands of hits overnight and had spread quickly across social media. Around this time, Butter Da Insider began working with the automaker to provide all of the appropriate details so that the corporate folks could begin doing their own research while Butter and other members of the YouTube community began assembling more evidence of poor business practices by the dealership. They found that the dealership in question hadn’t just done the soldier wrong, but they had been playing games with several prospective Demon 170 buyers, so the story just gets worse as you go down the rabbit hole.
Of course, we know how the story ends, with Tim Kuniskis stepping in, allocating a Dodge Challenger SRT Demon 170 from a small batch that was being used for a dealership sales contest and using the Jailbreak program to give the soldier the exact car that he wants – without dealership markup or games. He will even get to meet Jay Leno, who is hosting the delivery process when the soldier returns from deployment. However, if not for this viral video, there is a good chance that this story would gone unrecognized and unresolved like so many similar stories, so in the battle between new car buyers and unscrupulous dealerships, this video from Butter Da Insider played a massive role in a win for the good guys. Today, that video has garnered more than 234,000 clicks and for those who haven’t seen it, you can watch it below.