Hi everyone,
I'm not an owner, so I hope this post isn't taken amiss, but I own two Corvettes, an older coupe and a newer Z06, and have been shopping for a Viper for about four months. I wanted to chime in because I think I'm the kind of person who SRT was trying to attract with this car. I'm cross shopping vs. other exotic brands. So I wanted to throw in my two cents about the future of the SRT viper.
I think the SRT Viper is the greatest looking American car to come out in the last 30 years. It fixed every dated line on the already beautiful GTS, namely the doofy headlights, the pancake-flat hood, the way-too-big rear hatch glass, and the severely dated wheels. It looks amazing. This brings me to my first point strength that the Viper team needs to play up:
1. It follows nobody. Corvette is always biting Porsche's heels. Porsche really wants Ferrari's cachet. The Viper is totally its own thing. No other car in the world is built with this design ethic, this styling, and this setup. I think it runs the only non-flat-plane-crank v10 in any sports car. That makes the car desperately cool. Viper needs to play up this attitude more. It shouldn't ever have resorted to "These seats are from Ferrari's suppler, (look at us, we're luxurious like them!)" The tagline all along should have been, "Come for a ride, you'll forget all about your Ferrari." That brings me to my next point.
2. By playing ****-up to other brands, the Viper lost out on the fact that it was once considered a legitimate rival of the best of them. I still remember the days when the Gen II GTS was considered a legitimate alternative to the Diablo if you wanted to take names between lights and laugh your ass off on back roads afterwards. Mags said it all the time, "Diablo or GTS if you want fun!" By comparing yourself to other brands in a yearning way, you lower yourself below them. By saying "our interior is like a Ferrari now" you draw attention to the fact that you've been below their standards before. By playing up (and raging about) a comparison with Corvette, you go from being unambiguously greater in everyone's eyes to being their rival. Being a rival of an inferior never does good things. How many cars has Aston Marton made that are faster than a GTR? You'll never hear their CEO get pissed because they lost to a Datsun in a MotorMag comparison. Even if the Viper was slower than the ZR1, the true supercar thing to do would be to default to the excuse that Lambo and Ferrari owners have been using against Corvette owners for years: "At the end of the race, you're still in the Corvette, and we're still in the exotic supercar."
3. Always remember-think like a supercar. Nobody considered the Viper to be "just a Dodge." People walk past 911 GT2's and old Ferraris to get to a Viper at a car show like the Euros aren't even there. The Dodge branding is not the problem, nor is the price, the problem is that the Viper lost some of its attitude at the brand level. In the 90's, it was all "I'm an American supercar, deal with it!" Now they're tepid, trying clumsily to justify their price in interviews rather than just owning it as the fabulously frivolous extravagance it is to get into a very exclusive club. The problem isn't that people are choking on a $140,000 Dodge, because a Viper is a Viper first, and a Dodge second.
So, what real changes should be made to the car (within reason) to make it sell better? Not a lot, as most of the problems are ethos and sales-pitch related, but there are definitely a few:
Engine: The older cars had something that connected them to exotics, which they never shouted about-Exposed, beautiful metal engines. You open a Gen 1-4, and BAM, huge metal intake, fuel rails, the whole bit. People see that and they think, "Hey, you know what other engine looks like this? One from Lambo, Ferrari, Aston, Audi R8 V10, etc. You open a car and see plastic covers, you instantly think of cheap ****ty econoboxes, or a budget exotic like the 911 or the Corvette. Either way, the Viper, which is a true hair-shirted exotic, loses. No weight savings is worth a plastic engine covering.
Exhaust: Titanium, and for God's sake, install high-flow cats at the factory. There should be zero heat scorch/cabin heat issues in 2013. You can use aerogel to help this too.
Brakes: Can you think of a single exotic of this caliber that doesn't have CCBS? If you need, as Ralph did, to explain to journalists how steel brakes can be "pretty much as good" in interviews, you already lost. Just buy them. Nobody that can go in for a $140,000 car can't go in for one that costs $148,000. Fearing those minor price bumps are thinking like a Dodge marketer rather than a supercar marketer. You're out of the blue-collar-drywaller-on-a-pension market already, so spend like you're selling to anesthesiologists.
Frame: It should be aluminum. If the Viper is going to beat up high tech giants, it needs to make gains by losing some weight. Steel frames are also yestertech for almost every supercar, and not in a good way.
Lubrication: Dry sump. GTS name=race car in most people's minds. Own it by fully prepping it for the track.
Buck the market trend with a staggering warranty. I've always advocated American sports cars going to town on Euros with this marketing strategy, and the Viper could be king of the hill here. We all know that the Viper is the lowest maintenance, most durable true exotic out there. So play off that. 10 year/100,000 mile power train and instead of negatively sucking up to the exotics in comparisons, point out the fragility as the serious fault it is: "You'll need to set aside $5000 to service our rivals from Italy if you drive 15,000 miles a year, but you'll only spend $1500 on our Viper because we have better engineering. Save your money for tires!
Allow test drives. No way in hell am I buying anything that costs as much as a condo without seeing what it's like first. This should be really played up: Set up an auto-x at SRT dealerships with safe runoff and then get people in the seats. I'd even open it up to qualified Viper aspirants who aren't quite there yet (say the just-graduated computer scientist or mechanical engineer now making $90K), because they're going to be making $160K in a couple years and be able to afford at least a base Viper. Get the blood flowing.
Anyway, sorry for the long post, but I just wanted to let you know that there are non "Viper guys" out there that are interested in the car, and its survival.
Easily Done 
