Automotive performance enthusiasts may have felt lukewarm toward hybrid and electric vehicles at first, but after seeing bone-stock Teslas embarrass high-powered muscle cars so many times, one's opinions can't help but evolve.

Indeed, it's well understood that electrification has its place in automotive performance - a fact maybe best illustrated by hybrid hypercars like the Porsche 918 and McLaren P1, or by the fact that the next big thing to happen to the Ford Mustang will be a pure-electric crossover model. And electrification might find a home at Dodge's sport-oriented SRT brand, FCA's North American Head of Passenger Cars says, although the timeline for that renaissance is still uncertain.

"We're very interested in electrification, specifically for performance," FCA's Tim Kuniskis told Motor1 in an interview recently. "I think it is absolutely the future of performance, and it's what is going to enable performance to exist amid [ever-stricter emissions] regulations."

Not only that, but electrification will also be a means to extract "massive capability," he says, and "higher performance than anything that we've seen up until this point."

Of course, "future" does not necessarily mean "near future," and Kuniskis is all too aware of the obstacles facing electrification. Most crucially, it's "not cost-effective" in a lot of current applications, he says.

"Let's say you have a trim that you want to make into an awesome electrified performance car, and you're going to sell 5,000 of them," he explained. "There's no way to justify the expense to do that because of the cost of technology."

But put that same electrification tech into a higher-volume product and suddenly, "that opens up the door for the crazies," Kuniskis says.

The possibilities are endless. Could the next Dodge Challenger SRT Hellcat trade in its supercharged Hemi for a high-output plug-in-hybrid system? Might the legendary Dodge Viper return as the ultimate battery-electric track day weapon? We can't wait to find out.