2008 Dodge Viper*

This is a beautiful car.  Unfortunately, it’s also an annoying one for me.  For someone who owns so many Mopars, it was always a hole in my collection.  As I watched the Vipers over the years, this was the body style that I really liked.  It’s a mean looking machine.  Dodge introduced Snakeskin Green in 2008, and I really loved the look of the car with it.  I also had the Snakeskin stripes put on it.  It was a gorgeous car.

Overall, the car was a beast.  Lots of power and it was a brute.  Nothing sophisticated about it – I often felt that I was wrestling with the car.  I’m not complaining, it was just different than some of the other cars I had.

Unfortunately, the one thing that they couldn’t make work on the car was the sound.  It’s a V-10 instead of a V-8, and it just doesn’t sound the same.   While the exhaust was loud, it just sounded wrong.  I never got used to it.  In fact, every time I got into the car and started it, it annoyed me.  I always thought it was my problem, not the cars.  It was during a tour in Detroit at Chrysler that I had a chance to meet the Chief Engineer of the Viper project.  When I told him how much the sound of the motor bothered me, he admitted that it was a common problem.  Chrysler spent a lot of time and money trying to improve it, even going so far as to try to change it acoustically.  Unfortunately, they couldn’t do it.  If the car had sounded differently, I would have liked it a lot more.