There is no denying that the Dodge Viper is a pretty badass sports-car. The question is...would you pay $138,000 for it? Most buyers it seems are not biting, so now Dodge is offering a $15,000 discount to get Vipers off the lots and on the streets.
From Automotive News:
The brand will cut $15,000 from the sticker price of the more than 600 unsold Vipers on dealer lots. It also will offer $15,000 coupons to recent Viper buyers to trade in their 2013 or 2014 Viper on another one or to buy an additional Viper, and it will open Viper sales to all Dodge dealers.
In today's AOTD we saw a Viper that is already heavily discounted from the $135,000 MSRP. The Viper had several factors that contributed to the slow sales, the primary reason was price. The previous generation was less than $100,000; once the price pushed over $125,000 and the V10 sports-car was hard to justify.
I'm sure Dodge won't admit it, but the fact that the C7 Corvette is so good, yet much cheaper could have impacted sales as well. It also didn't help that many dealers tacked on markups when the Viper first hit the showrooms.
There's also the not-so-small matter of the Corvette Z06, which is more powerful than the Viper, will offer an automatic transmission option, and will be priced significantly less at $78,995. If the Viper couldn't compete with the normal Corvette, how could it compete with the Z06?
Now Dodge has a plan to rectify that situation.
"I think the current car is so much better than any other Viper we've ever built, but we've got to fix the one last piece: We've got to fix the retail equation. We've got to fix what's going on in the dealership, in the showroom...It's the dealer network, it's the inventory, it's the pricing, it's how we sell the car. We have to fix all of that." - Tim Kuniskis
So even with 15 grand off the sticker...would you buy one?