Frank 03SRT
Enthusiast
I was thinking -- what caused the 03 RT to look and perform like it does/will? What did Dodge management tell its designers at project start? How about this:
1. Find savings from the current way of building this car, but still have a hand built one.
2. Keep the price to about $75K so that current owners can afford them.
3. Give viper folks their performance wishes.
4. Plow savings from 1. back into the car.
5. And, the big one for the Dodge corporation image, make the car a winner.
Answers:
1. How were the savings accomplished? One item I can think of is the hood -- that thing costs Dodge, what, $10K in materials? Fitting it must be real tough. How about the gas cap? There must be others.
2. By decreasing costs, they approach satisfying the price limit.
3. It is appearing that Dodge has more than satisfied performance wishes, by what we hear from those in the know. From what I hear, the current beautiful "swoopy" design degraded perforrmance because of increased drag. Therefore, it probably had to go.
4. Plowing savings back into the car gets us the performance characteristics and other goodies we wanted.
5. By having a design with less drag, while still maintaining the basic Viper look, yet with much higher performance, Dodge satisfies their image needs.
So, I believe, as some past philosopher said, we probably "have the best of all possible worlds". Dodge gets what they need to even be allowed to produce this car, and we get the hottest car on the road for the price, and it still looks great.
1. Find savings from the current way of building this car, but still have a hand built one.
2. Keep the price to about $75K so that current owners can afford them.
3. Give viper folks their performance wishes.
4. Plow savings from 1. back into the car.
5. And, the big one for the Dodge corporation image, make the car a winner.
Answers:
1. How were the savings accomplished? One item I can think of is the hood -- that thing costs Dodge, what, $10K in materials? Fitting it must be real tough. How about the gas cap? There must be others.
2. By decreasing costs, they approach satisfying the price limit.
3. It is appearing that Dodge has more than satisfied performance wishes, by what we hear from those in the know. From what I hear, the current beautiful "swoopy" design degraded perforrmance because of increased drag. Therefore, it probably had to go.
4. Plowing savings back into the car gets us the performance characteristics and other goodies we wanted.
5. By having a design with less drag, while still maintaining the basic Viper look, yet with much higher performance, Dodge satisfies their image needs.
So, I believe, as some past philosopher said, we probably "have the best of all possible worlds". Dodge gets what they need to even be allowed to produce this car, and we get the hottest car on the road for the price, and it still looks great.