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Chrysler restarts Dodge Viper production after temporary hiatus

Chrysler's Dodge brand will restart making its Viper on July 21 after temporarily shutting down production. Chrysler stopped producing the Dodge Viper to figure out a better strategy to boost sales.

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Tony Overman/The Olympian/AP/File
Student Mike Murphy of Yelm, Wash., washes the one-of-a-kind, $250,000 Dodge Viper SRT in the automotive shop at South Puget Sound Community College in Tumwater, Wash., March 4, 2014. Dodge will restart making its Viper on July 21 after temporarily shutting down production.

Dodge will restart production of its Viper on July 21 after a temporary shutdown was instigated at the car’s Conner Avenue Assembly Plant in Detroit to better align inventories with sales. Production had resumed briefly late last month, but Dodge has confirmed to Autoblog that full production of the Viper will only commence on the 21st of this month.

Dodge sold just 591 Vipers in 2013, well short of the 2,000 cars it touted during the car’s launch, and as of March 1, 2014 a total of 756 Vipers were unsold, representing a staggering 412 day supply. The pace of sales of the Viper during the months of January and February averaged fewer than two cars per day, and although the winter was extreme in many states Chevrolet still managed to sell 2,261 Corvettes in January and 2,438 in February.
But then again, the Viper is a niche product and is priced considerably higher than the Corvette. This is especially true when you consider that less than 29,000 Vipers have been built since the original debuted back in the early ‘90s.

In order to help boost sales by better catering to the needs of the Viper’s discerning customers, dealerships selling the car have had to undergo a training program that paired staff with existing Viper owners and potential buyers so that they could form a better understanding of the market’s needs.
The latest Viper was all-new for 2013. Since then, a track-focused Viper Time Attack model has been launched. And more recently we saw the Viper rebranded a Dodge (as opposed to an SRT) following Fiat Chrysler Automobile’s decision to make SRT an official tuner to Dodge instead of a standalone brand.

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