Well, nobody but Herb and his family knows for sure the full reasons behind his early retirement. That said, some folks say that it was a "limited time only" offer that he would have been foolish to pass up - no matter how much you loved the car or its future.
As for the gas guzzling issues, remember that the CAFE standards apply to fleet averages. Certainly they don't expect your Hummer to get 35 MPG nor your Lamborghini for that matter. Historically they have based this on the number of vehicles sold with a given gas mileage. For simple math's sake, it went like this:
- You sold 95 cars getting an average of 30 MPG
- You sold five cars getting an average of 10 MPG
So does that mean they average 20 MPG? Nope! That means that you averaged
29 MPG on the 100 cars you sold. Now, in 2007 Chrysler LLC sold just over two
million vehicles. While they didn't build Vipers in 2007, historically they sell around 1600 per year. That means that Viper sales represent less than 1/10th of one percent of Chrysler's production. It could get 1 MPG and wouldn't even make a dimple on the overall CAFE averages.
On the other hand, while it represents less than 1/10th of 1% of production, it represents at least 20% of Chrysler's recognition and 50% of Dodge in particular. Run a series of flash cards showing cars with no badging and I will bet that you see those numbers when they see a Viper. 80% of the Chrysler line will be hard to name and 50% of the Dodge line will be the same. Throw out the same models with different brands (Grand Caravan/Town & Country, Aspen/Durango, Sebring/Avenger, Nitro/Liberty, etc.) and you only have a handful of recognizable cars, of which the Viper is most prominent followed by distinctive cars such as the 300 and Charger. Will the Challenger be a recognized car for Dodge? Of course it will. But if it sells 50,000 copies a year then it will have 30 times the impact on CAFE standards as the Viper and should be 30 times as vulnerable unless it can deliver a lot closer to 35 MPG.
The bottom line is that while the Viper is little more than an asterisk on CAFE standards and profit margins for Chrysler as a whole, it represents a HUGE impact on the psyche of car buyers everywhere. While Chrysler has failed to leverage that impact outside of the Viper owner community (the latter of which we are grateful I can assure you), the Viper continues to represent all the great things an American car company can do. Kids flock to see them, US military events beg to have them, magazines flaunt them, and
thousands of companies use them in advertisements - even when the manufacturer doesn't.
Personally I think that the Viper sells more cars than every Dodge NASCAR team combined. The ol' adage of "win on Sunday, sell on Monday" applied when the cars actually looked like production cars and you could drive what the winner drove. Now they all look the same and the only thing that distinguishes them is their main sponsor (car colors) and the driver. When Tony Stewart wins, the fans wear Home Depot jerseys and hats. Many don't even realize who manufactures the "generic" car he won with. Does anybody
really believe they will sell a lot more Camrys when he drives Toyota this year? If so, then Chrysler is completely lost as NASCAR is one of the last bastions of jingoistic American fervor.
Oh, Cerberus is definitely all about the money - nobody will debate that. But sometimes you can actually
make money by leveraging your marketing to its full extent to increase company recognition and resulting sales. Cerberus hired a marketing Dream Team for Chrysler - Jim Press and Deborah Wahl Meyer. While we can say that the Viper is doomed by CAFE standards and other nonsense that doesn't apply, the fact is that unless the Dream Team realizes the
marketing value of this icon then its days truly are numbered. So it is up to the fans and owners of the Viper to make sure they know it.
