I haven't been to a dealership (yet) that has a Viper on the floor.
Did they upgrade the area around the Viper? Displays? Is it standardized from one Dealer to the next? What did the $25K buy um (not tools) from SRT to help sell them? Anyone with pics?
Until two weeks ago, I hadn't been to a Dodge dealer since maybe 1987? But I don't think the dealer where I purchased has upgraded its showroom. It's pretty basic, blue collar America. IMO, however, there's nothing wrong with that. From my experience, it seems that the more high end the showroom, the more you get reamed on the cost of service.
I don't see the Porsche guy (The new customer? says SRT) telling his buddies how great the SRT... errr Dodge sales experience is.... He is going to have to make up some BS story about how good the bottomless cappuccino was and, how hot the gal in finance is....
I think you are right that Viper won't appeal to the
majority of Porsche owners, who at this point buy Porsches because of the image more than anything else. But I do think that the Viper will appeal to the subset of more traditional Porsche guys, many of whom are just plain ******** gear heads and racers. Most of these guys also buy other brands. And anyone nuts enough to still be driving a rear engined car for high performance fun in 2013 will likely consider other similarly extreme ideas, like big block, front engine, RWD cars.
The average guy on the street has no clue about Woodhouse (shave your legs Bill? to attract the "new" Viper customer) and a few others..(that can be counted on one hand) So, his (Porshe guy) sales experience is going to **** **** ****! Wait till he has to get it serviced eeek! We (multiple Viper owners through time) have just put up with poor Dealer sales/service cause we love the car. The "new" customer dropping $140K+++ won't! And most likley won't repeat.
I can't speak on Dodge sales or service at this point, other than to say that my experience has been surprisingly good. But, it may be that Porsche, Mercedes and BMW have helped to lower my expectations over time? Other than one sales guy and one service guy that I've known for several years, the others I've dealt with are generally pretty mediocre. I won't take my Porsches to a dealer for service, other than for warranty service (and only then because its the only way to get a defect fixed for free). In fact, the last two times I've taken my 911 in (to two different dealers), they didn't even know how to read the dipstick. I s*it you not. Both service reps claimed to know that the distance from top to bottom (on the electronic display, as there is no "stick" any more) is 1 qt. But it's actually 4 qts on the 991. Worse, neither dealer's technician bothered to verify whether or not the half quart they added actually moved the reading at all. (It finally moved one of four bars after both dealers added a half a quart to "top it off".)
One other thing that's kind of interesting. My 2013 911 had two quality issues right off the bat. The Viper has none that I can find.
P.S. I'm beginning to think that German cars are headed in a similar trajectory (down) to Japanese cars a decade ago.