UPDATE 5/22/15 – Recently another video of the 12 valve Cummins powered Charger was posted (above). To show the awesome nature of this conversion, the owner decided to hook up his boat and haul it around. While it isn’t the biggest boat around, it does appear that the Charger is hauling it with ease.

Let’s face it, diesel power is what makes the world go around. It hauls the lumber to build homes, it carries food to market, and it drives ocean-going vessels.

As a matter of fact, there are not too many industries that can do without diesel engines. One of our favorite things to see are innovative engine swaps, and in this case, it’s a very unusual diesel-engine swap.

We are always on the lookout for vehicles with diesel engine transplants. We recently brought you a story detailing a Duramax powerplant swapped into a 2006 Chevy Colorado mid-size pickup that can roast its tires, a Cummins engine packed into a custom 1962 Ford F-100 pickup truck, and a dialog with three guys who have transplanted Kubota diesel engines into their vehicles.

But what about a musclecar with a diesel engine swap? Well, we thought you might ask. So here is a story of Nathan Mueller. Mueller squeezed a Cummins diesel engine into his 2006 Dodge Charger, and does some of the best smoky burnouts with his diesel-powered musclecar that we have ever seen.

This is what Mueller told us about this project. “My 2006 Dodge Charger now has a Cummins 5.9-liter, 12-valve diesel engine in it, and it’s backed up by an NV4500 manual transmission. The video (above) shows some of the build photos I shot during the swap, along with some footage of smoke and burnouts I did once the project was complete.”

“The entire job took me about 200 hours, but my ultimate goal was to build something unique, because it’s really satisfying to me to create something that people tell you just can’t be done. The Charger now gets 25 mpg or better, and is a heck of a lot of fun to drive.”