Dodge Viper tagged posts

If you have followed news of the Dodge Viper, you may have already known the latest generation of the sports car does not sell well since its debut.

In fact, Dodge has suspended its production multiple times to keep its days of inventory from growing. But it looks this does not help with the situation too much, so Dodge determined to execute a more aggressive plan now: significantly cut the price of the new car, by a massive $15,000.

For the 2015 model year, the MSRP of the Viper will be what you see for the 2014 model year, MINUS $15,000...

We have reported in August, Dodge is working on a supercharged version of the V10, which will be used in the Viper.

Today news surfaced and indicated that, this upgrade will happened in the 2016 model year. For the 2016 Viper, not only we will see the supercharged V10, but also comes a convertible variant.

We estimate the final output of the 2016 Viper will exceed the 800hp mark.

We all know during the past few months the media hotspot for the Dodge brand is its 707hp 2015 Challenger SRT Hellcat and Charger SRT Hellcat.

The SRT Hellcat cars is equipped with a supercharged 6.2L V8 with 707hp and 650 lb-ft of torque. Compared to this, the current SRT Viper’s naturally aspirated 8.4L V10 “only” delivers 640hp and 600 lb-ft of torque.

Without question the SRT Hellcat will impact sales volume of the SRT Viper, which is already down to a level so low that, Chrysler needs to halt the production several times during the past year.

Chrysler also knows this, and they will not just sit there and wait for this situation to continue...

Remember when Dodge officially announced the 2015 Challenger more than one month ago, it said the SRT model will come with “600-plus horsepower”.

Today it turns out the “600-plus” figure is way too conservative, because Dodge officailly released the final number: 707 hp, with 650 lb-ft of torque.

This is surprising, because 707 is excessively more than “600 plus”.

But this is not surprising too, because with the help of force induction you can achieve whatever level of output you want, theoretically speaking. Since Mercedes-Benz can pump out 360hp from the 2.0L displacement engine in the CLA45 AMG, why should not Dodge get 707hp from a displacement of 6...

The following information comes from a Chrysler engineer who has been heavily involved in the Dodge SRT Viper’s design process.

During the design phase of the current SRT Viper, Chrysler’s marketing team has evaluated and ranked almost 20 aspects that a supercar buyer would mostly be concerned with, using consumer survey data.

The results are pretty interesting. The top 4 factors that the sample customers put heavy weights on are (in order of voting count):  1. car body styling curve (30%); 2. total curb weight (18%); 3. torsional rigidity of the chassis; 4. engine torque. Surprisingly, zero-to-sixty time and top speed are not the most important parameters...