Father of the Viper Tells Why it Died
 

Father of the Viper Tells Why it Died
By Brian Dally

How does the father of the Viper feel about Fiat Chrysler Automobiles ending his creation’s life? Find out inside.
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I heard rumor they were working on a hemi style head for that V10 before they officially cancelled production...650hp on it's own, then add the architecture of an apache cylinder head...good chance it would've been at or above 700hp naturally aspirated.

LOL... most average folks couldn`t afford to buy it anyway. Now it will be far more expensive due to being killed off. Only even richer people will be able to buy them. Good ridence.

I like Bob; however, the truth is so much simpler than that. The biggest reason why it died was no automatic transmission. Back when the Viper first sold, Lamborghinis came with one transmission choice (manual),. All but one model Ferrari had nothing but a manual to choose from and the one that had automatic was the entry level Ferrari. The attitude was if you came in looking for a top level sports car and asked if you could get one with an automatic transmission, they would laugh until they learned you were serious...then they would laugh harder. That was the expectation of the market if you wanted a car of that caliber, if you couldn't drive a manual you would either learn or get something more tame

Fast forward to 2013, you couldn't even get a Ferrari with a manual. And with Lamborghinis only the entry level model and not the more premium model. When the market changes you can choose to adapt or die. I wish they would have adapted. I would rather have seen an optional automatic during that generation even if it would eventually be the end of the manual version.

Another factor I think was the hellcat just not the way they did it. If the hellcat had been based not on a supercharged hemi but instead the Viper v10 which means investing in the v10 to increase its power NA means ( hemi heads, dual injection, even 4 valve heads, etc.) They could have achieved similar outputs with the v10 improving the economies of scale helping profitablity and from there considered either offering a more affordable Viper with the 6.4 as the base engine (or another model with a different name like venom or copperhead with slightly different styling on the Viper platform to fill in the entry level model to satisfy the purist).