The Original 1992 Dodge Viper Was a Ridiculously Basic, Dangerous Sports Car

This is a

1992

Dodge Viper, the

original

Viper, in fact the fifth Viper ever made. This car is an icon with some really amazing features or rather lack of features that I will show you in a few minutes. It's also scary because this car has no electronics. help or babysitters or security measures to prevent you from killing yourself. It's a performance car in the truest sense of the term, in the old school sense and today I'm going to review it before we get started. Be sure to check out the cars and deals. which is my new online enthusiast car auction website that has been very successful with some incredible recent sales including this cadillac cts-v wagon that sold for 56,000. and this 1993 mercedes 400 e amg that sold sold for 37 000. if you are looking to get the most money for your cool car, sell it on cars and bids.

I borrowed this

viper

from the peterson museum here in los angeles, the peterson museum has one of the largest car collections ever assembled at any time and if you are in los angeles and want to see

basic

ally anything and everything interesting that has to do with the cars. The Peterson Museum is the place to go see it. Check out Peterson by clicking the link in the description below, so let's talk about Viper. The Viper was

original

ly conceived. in the late 1980s, as a kind of modern Shelby Cobra, a small two-seat

sports

car with a huge engine and

basic

ally nothing else.

Now, as the years went by, the Viper added more luxuries and features to keep up with consumer demand, but when it first came out. In

1992

, this car had basically nothing. This car is windowless, but it has serious performance credentials. Under the hood is an 8-liter V10 with 400 horsepower and 465 pound-feet of torque. Now those may not seem like huge numbers. until you realize this car is only a foot and a half longer than a miata, now the

viper

only came in one direction, two seats, rear wheel drive, manual transmission, there was no stability control, no traction control, No airbags, no anti-lock brakes, just a v10 engine. and a small

sports

car, it's not surprising that consumers eventually started demanding luxuries and features that the original Viper didn't have and as I mentioned, it later added those luxuries and features to make buyers happy, but for me it lost the purpose of the ultra. original focused viper so this is the original ultra focused viper and today I'm going to show you around it and all its interesting quirks and features.

There are a lot of them, then I'll take it out on the road and drive. and then I'll give it an excellent score. I'm going to start with the Viper's quirks and features by discussing some of the features it doesn't have. Now the purpose of this car was to make a simple, let's go back to the basic sports car, so they wanted to remove all the distractions and stupid things that you don't need, but it's amazing how far they went, for example, you know how they have door handles of your car, yes, well, the Viper didn't have them. at least not on the outside, you can look here, there is no door handle to be found.

Instead, if you wanted to open the door from the outside, you had to reach for the inside door handle, pull it and that would open the door and that was the only way to get in from the outside now I know what you're thinking, right? What happens when the windows are closed so you can't easily reach the inside door handle? So how do you get in? The answer is. This car also has no windows, you can see it on the door panel, there are no windows there and there is no crank or switch to raise the window.

This car is so basic that it doesn't even have windows, which is nice. Something impressive to remove now I have to admit that the viper technically did not have any window, but rather each original viper was delivered with this black bag and inside this black bag was this thing that was the window, look at this you wanted to install the window, you actually had to physically lift it into place and then clip it on these little clips on the door and then it would go in and that's how you put the window in your viper, you didn't just roll it up you had to literally install it in place but anyway back to back to the previous question, okay, if these windows are in place, then how do you get in, how do you reach in and open the door?

The answer is although you could install these windows and place them. here they are plastic and surrounded by a zipper that can be opened from the outside, so even if the windows were in place and the roof was on these cars they also came with a fabric roof, you could simply climb up, open the window and then reached in and opened the door using the inside door handle, so there was virtually no security at all with these early vipers, another feature they felt was unnecessary and that lack of security extended beyond the interior and even the hood. now in your car you want to get under the hood, there is a little latch on the driver's foot as you pull it and it opens and when you have the doors closed no one can reach that latch and get into the engine compartment, not like that with the original Viper on this car there is no internal engine release, instead you want to get into the engine bay, just walk up to the front bumper, reach under here, pull a little latch and then it will pop up and from there you can open it completely.

Which I'll show you in a few minutes. Safety wasn't really something that was thought to be important for this car. That being said, it really wouldn't have mattered if they had put the hood release lever inside the car because anyone can get in. the car because the locks are completely useless. You see, this car has locks on the doors, but there is no keyhole on the outside where you can close them, so the only way to close the doors is to close them with your hand and then walk away, but if you could. reach to close the doors and walk away then a thief could easily reach into the doors to unlock the doors and gain access to the car and do pretty much whatever he wanted so the car was never really locked even when it was locked again the security wouldn't it really was. great consideration with the viper and by the way, speaking of security and the key, take a look, this one has been duplicated, but you can see it's just a simple Chrysler key from the early 90's, nothing unusual or special here, just one of the many details and features. which they removed to make the Viper as basic and simple as possible and then we move inside the Viper, where there are quite a few more interesting features that were left out in the search for a back-to-basics Shelby Cobra-style sports car, for example.

Just behind the seats you can see that there is a roll bar. Now many convertibles have it. It's taller than your head, so if you turn around, it will make sure you don't have a serious head injury, except there's a warning label next to it. the roll bar which specifically says that this top mount is not a roll bar and then ominously says that this is an open vehicle, drive carefully, in other words this will not save you if you roll over so don't crash because you will die, It's a nice warning label to see and a lot more was left out than just knowing your car has air conditioning, yeah not this one, this car also doesn't have any storage space in the door panel for a wallet or paperwork anything and There is no center console storage in this car either and there is no room in this car between the seats there was room there but as you can see Dodge put in speakers because they knew their customers and they knew steam.

Owners would rather drive through music than store things. Now in terms of storage, this car had a glove box, so from the passenger side the usual location and it was a pretty large glove box, but it was at the expense of the airbags that this car had. none none for the passenger nor the driver that kind of heavy and unnecessary safety feature was simply considered superfluous there was no point in adding it to the viper but it wasn't just a lack of features and amenities that made it clear that this was intended to be a Let's go back to the basic sports car with a focus on performance and nothing else.

There were a few more obvious places you could look in this interior for that message, including how cheap it is. Take a look, for example, at the doorpost, you can see exposed screws. Inside, this was an expensive car when new. The exposed screws look so ugly and there are more of them on the top of the board, just exposed screws holding things together again. It looks terrible and cheap, but that's what they did and beyond that. The materials on this car overall seemed so cheap that it had the cheapest, crappiest plastic Chrysler could find anywhere in this interior.

Nothing was pleasant. Nothing looked good. Nothing was high-end like you'd expect from an expensive V10 exotic sports car. That was even true. From the radio, the Viper didn't get a good special high-end radio so you could actually play the music. You have this standard Chrysler head unit that doesn't even say Dodge, says Chrysler, the parent company, so they could put it on the cheap. on vehicles of all their brands and that included the viper just this horrible generic chrysler stereo but here's the thing, all those features, this car doesn't have all the obvious cost cuts in this interior, that was the point of this car again .

It was supposed to be a modern Shelby Cobra, something you got into, drove, pulled out the tail, listened to the v10, the rest of the stuff didn't matter much, so it was okay to save money on the interior and not put in a usable door very obvious. handles on the car no one who bought this car cared about those things, they just wanted to go fast and keep the cost reasonable and that's exactly what Dodge did. This is basically an engine and some wheels and some seats and a kind of car around it too because I had to do it and then beyond the cheapness and the lack of features, some other interesting quirks in this interior, one is among the two gauges, you can see there is a smaller center gauge that is black, this is where all the warning lights were the check engine light. the handbrake light also had an upshift light here, you might be able to see the outline of it, it would tell you when to upshift for optimal fuel economy if that was something you wanted to do with your viper and talk fuel Optimum Economy In your Viper, this car had a skip shift feature, meaning that if you were going very slow, without accelerating hard, and you went out of first gear, it would guide you into fourth gear to save gas and improve your fuel economy. fuel, so the viper with its eight liter v10 engine would knock you out of second place and into fourth place in most normal driving circumstances to

ridiculously

increase fuel consumption and then another Interesting quirk of the Viper's interior was removing the key from the ignition, it was not that simple. just turn off the car and take out the key like in most modern cars, instead there is a little lever that you had to push down while taking out the key to make sure you were absolutely sure you wanted to turn off the car. and take out the key so you don't accidentally do that while driving.

I love that this car doesn't have traction control, stability control, analog brakes, airbags, but they do have a safety guard to make sure you don't accidentally roll off. the key while you're on the interstate is good and the next one is a pretty interesting quirk of the original viper the location of the seat belt because the belts are in the door you can see it with the door open the seat belt opens with the doors lo which is very strange and seems tremendously unsafe if the doors are deformed in an accident or if they fly off, the seat belt goes with them, it is usually mounted at some fixed point on the car, but on the previous Viper it is on the door that I now have. a 97 viper, a second generation model and the seat belts were mounted in the center, not on the door, so I guess at some point they were probably forced to change that by regulation and then they talked about another safety issue on this car like I needed something else, that would be the location of the exhaust which was right under the doors.

Now this doesn't seem so bad at first, you can hear the sound of the engine when you drive, it seems great, except when you get out of the car. The whole panel is tremendously hot, so it was very common for people with early vipers to go out and burn their ankles because they accidentally touched the exhaust that was there, in an unusual place. Chrysler placed a giant warning label on the door sill to remind you. Don't do this butobviously most people don't really look at that and there were a lot of burns anyway and then coming out of the original viper a couple of interesting points stand out from this angle, one being the fact that the outside appearance with not having Handles on the doors is great.

I make fun of this car for having to reach in and open the doors, but you have to admit it looks clean and beautiful without door handles, so to some extent I'm glad they did it this way. What I really like from this angle are the wheels. I've always loved the three-spoke wheels on the original Vipers. Now a lot of Viper people think they look stupid or too small and update them or change them but for me this was the car show car these wheels in this color this is what the viper looks like in my opinion and since then they have all been just a variation of the original and iconic theme that is this car with these wheels now speaking of the wheels I must mention that the tires are original to this car.

This car has 30 year old tires and that's because it's been kept in very original shape overall because this is a special Viper as I mentioned, the fifth one built and if you look then you can see zero zero zero. Five, this is the fifth Viper to roll off the assembly line for the '92 model year and it's actually a little more special than that because it was technically a pre-production car that was never offered to the company. Instead, it was used to introduce the Viper to dealers. Dodge took this car all over North America and let dealers test drive it so they knew what the Viper was all about and I have to tell you hundreds of car dealers were driving a new V10 without traction control. super exotic sports car, we're lucky this vehicle survived, but it did with viper number five and then we move on to the front of the viper, there are some interesting quirks and features worth noting.

One thing I've always loved is the badge. on this car, which of course is a snake and a viper, but the cool thing is that the badge material actually looks like snake skin, which is a really neat touch, something you would only see if you look closely, but it is a good sign of attention. detail below, another interesting element up here, you can see it very well from your angle, which is the grill. The Viper doesn't really have a grille in the traditional sense, but it does have a very low one on the bumper and you can see that there is This cross-shaped design is because all Dodge models at the time had the crosshairs and were trying to linking the viper to the rest of the product line and that's why it looked like that on the front so everyone knew it wasn't just a viper. it was also a

dodge

and his thinking was that maybe people would see this and think that

dodge

was cool and then they would go out and buy a ram or a fearless and next i want to show you the engine, but first that requires opening the hood, which is not So.

Easy feat, this is one of the largest individual panels on a production car and you have to be very careful with it, so to open it like I showed you before I got down here, there's a little latch on the hood, you pull it and you get the hood to this point from here there is another latch on the front you have to carefully push the hood down pull it and then the hood is in this position but that's the easy part then you have to go around the back from the hood and pull. Ideally put it in the middle to a certain point to make sure it doesn't bend and then it's up and you can check the engine on the Viper so let's check the engine like I said this is a 400 liter V10 8. horsepower 465 lb-ft of torque a huge engine cover hides a huge engine it really is a huge power plant and I've always loved how Shelby Cobra was like this car just take a simple small sports car with a

ridiculously

big engine big and Look what happens and in this car what happened in many cases were severe accidents because it was a very

dangerous

and powerful car to drive.

Now, talking about the engine, I've always loved that it's red, it looks so powerful and muscular. Under the engine cover it's a really cool engine to see and it's always a pleasure when you can lift the giant hood of the Viper and speaking of the giant hood of the Viper, it's time to close it, closing it is easier than opening it. but you still have to be very careful, you just guide it down slowly and it somehow finds its place, you put it in this position, then you go back to the front and you push it down and it closes and then the motor is hidden again. in your viper ready for anyone to get in and open it from the outside and finally we move to the back of the viper and I want to talk about the trunk to open it you have to put the key in, turn it and then open it.

Upstairs there is no trunk release mechanism because of course why would there be now? The interesting thing about this trunk is that when you open it it doesn't stay open, it actually closes again, which underlines how basic this car is about keeping the trunk open. accessory like the one on most cars under the hood, you put the accessory in place and only then the trunk will stay up, but once you have done that, you can see that the trunk has no lining, there is no carpet here again, just a basic, simple car. without any frills you get a tire jack which is a nice feature and I think at one point there was a temporary tire here but it's gone but anyway that's the trunk of the original Viper, nothing nice just you were lucky.

Frankly, first of all, you have a trunk and finally, one last item worth mentioning here. Something I've always loved on the back of the Viper would be its badges. There was no room anywhere on the back to put badges, so I decided to dodge. by putting them on the bumper upside down you can't really see them and they painted them the same color as the car which made them even more invisible but it didn't really matter you knew what you were looking at if you saw one of these on the road the Badges weren't really necessary, so those are the quirks and features of the 1992 Dodge Viper, the fifth Viper ever made.

Now it's time to take it out on the road and see how well it handles driving the 92 Viper. No pressure here, this is just a museum car and the fifth Viper was no big deal. I have to tell you that I feel at home driving this car. I had a 97 viper gts. I did some videos that you might remember and this feels pretty similar in a lot of ways, especially the clutch, the shifter, that kind of stuff, but to me, the '92, the first Vipers were always the best, that's how it felt. designed the car and they had to water it down in later years to meet customer demand, but that's how the car was supposed to be, no windows and no air conditioning, this is the viper giving it some gas here, these are great, the thing about these cars is that they aren't that fast by modern standards, they really are just not 400 horsepower anymore, it's not that big of a number anymore, even with the v10 and the small size, but they are so pure, they are so pure that you get in this car and there are no windows in the roof, you don't need any of that.

That shit, it's just a wide two seat roadster with rear wheel drive and a V10 and that's the best thing about this car and as much as I like the later Vipers and I think the last ACR is crazy and the later Vipers were all great , it's just not the same, this car was a totally different experience to any viper that came after, now sitting at a traffic light you get the feeling that this car is like caged heat, which is why many modern exotics are very quiet and very relaxed at the same time. brake light, not this thing, it's shaking, it's rattling, it's doing its thing, you can feel vibrations in the steering wheel, the shifter, that's the point, that's what this car does and that's what it was, It was just a V10 bolted to a chassis and I just also love how everything here is the most horrible thing they could find, the finish is so bad, the quality of the materials, but I love it because that's the purpose of the car in the one where you get into some cars and the class and the interior isn't that nice its like what is this but you're missing out the viper wasn't meant to be that what i like about this car is that they didn't care about any of these things, they didn't need it to look good or feel good inside or have the nicest things like a Porsche and then the Viper evolved to a point where they did that and it kind of ruined part of what the car was originally about, now it's It became a different car and that was fine, but this was simply a back to basics car in the form of a vehicle that will probably never be made like this again, at least by a major automaker.

One thing I've always liked about the Viper is that it's actually pretty easy to drive. reasonably it has a fairly easy clutch fairly easy throttle quite easy shifter all of that really isn't that difficult as long as you are rational about it now where you get into trouble with the vipers is when you start pushing it and suddenly it becomes easy and its accessibility everything it just flips over and it can flip over in an instant and really go crazy on you and that's how a lot of these were put away and seriously damaged, in the end you have a 3000 pound car with absolutely no traction control or stability control of any kind. uh with a V10 in the front and they weren't that expensive so a lot of people bought them and they just didn't know what they were doing, they had never driven a car like this before and they crashed them and things didn't go well.

It's surprising that this car was ever given the green light for production. Nothing like this would be manufactured in today's world. We give him some gasoline. Here it transports and transports quite well. It feels reasonably fast, but I think the real thrill is the feeling of speed. You understand it because you're so low, so close to the road, uh, and just not that far away, you're a part of the experience and that's the 1992 Dodge Viper, this is a really amazing car, mainly because it looks like something that would have come out of the 1960s, no creature comforts, no features, all engine and horsepower and yet it came out of the 1990s, probably the last car like this that will ever come from a major automaker.

It's amazing to look at the original Viper and see how it was and now it's time to give the original Viper a doug score starting with the weekend categories and Viper styling. It looks great, not necessarily classically beautiful, but cool and gets a 7 out of 10. Acceleration from 0 to 60 is in the high 4s and gets a 6 out of 10. Handling is reasonably good and gets a 6 out of 10. fun factor is pretty high, this car isn't incredibly fast or powerful, but it's a hoot given the complete lack of driver raids and gets a 7 out of 10. Cool factor is high too, especially for the initial rt10 in red, it was a viper icon and gets a 7 out of 10 for a total weekend score of 33 out of 50.

Following are the daily categories and features for this car. The car basically has nothing, just the absolute basics and it gets a two out ten. Comfort is also a disaster. The seats are nice, but otherwise it's hard and you could melt on the way out. It gets a two out of ten. The quality is only a good replacement. The parts for this car are cheap, but you'll need them because it's just not built that well in the first place, the materials are just shit and it gets a 4 out of 10. Practicality is bad, it's ridiculously impractical without real windows. but at least it has two seats and gets a 2 out of 10.

Finally value and I think these are incredible values ​​especially the red 92s with the three spoke wheels these are iconic American sports cars and I can't believe they haven't made it yet. It's gotten more expensive, you can buy one of these for about 30 grand which is a total bargain and gets a 9 out of 10 for a total daily score of 19 out of 50. Add it up and Doug's score is 52 out of 100. which puts the viper here against relevant sports cars of this era, ties it with the viper gts from 1997. The blue and white car i had, the gts, is a little better in practically every way, but the rt10 is a little cooler and has a little better value since it's more.

From an overall icon, these older Vipers are fun exotic cars that you can buy cheap and serviced pretty cheaply too and I can't believe they aren't even more popular with enthusiasts.