2002 Dodge Viper. Muscle car or a Sports Car?

what's up throttle is the dodge gen 2 viper trying to kill you when you're driving well keep on watching as today you're in for a ride hi i'm nadine the co-founder of throttle and today i'm in foggy san francisco with my friend rahul editing hello so the answer to your question was no the gen 2 viper isn't trying to kill you i've owned this one for 18 months and i'll tell you why it isn't and why that misconception may have started and then we'll go for a ride and we'll see what it's like to dri

ve one sounds great so before we go for the ride how could you tell us a little bit about this little badge right there when the dodge viper first came out or the gen 2 came out dodge had it set at 450 horsepower and 450 foot pounds but really giant engine like that it's very easy to get more power out of it so this was a package that was installed by a dealer in the northeast and they actually dynode it afterwards so it has 531 foot pounds and 506 horsepower so one of the things you talked abou

t earlier was it is trying to kill people who are completely inexperienced i mean i think one of the problems with the viper is a lot of people keep them don't really change them and run very few miles on them so when i bought this car it had 13 000 miles on it it was 16 years old and when i first got it i saw that the tires were the original tyres the car came with in 2002 you really don't want to be driving any car on 17 year old tires so the first thing i did was put some nice sticky r compou

nd tires on it and now you really have to be driving like a hooligan to get the back end to step out like so one of the best things about the dodge viper is it's got a v10 naturally aspirated engine so it must be angry it is so much fun when it first came out it was the largest passenger car engine since world war ii the dodge is about lots of power in a nice package so how about we pop the hood and then we check out the sound let's do it all right [Music] yeah this is probably the part of the v

iper everyone remembers the joint eight liter engine and the mods that the dealer did when this car was first sold it's got a cold air intake on there it's got headers and roller rockers and that's all you really need to do straight bolting and you can push it up to 500 horsepower which is kind of crazy okay well let's rev it let's hear what it sounds like so speaking of wanting just taking a look at this hood is this fiberglass it is fiberglass when the car came out this was the single most exp

ensive body panel on any car sold in america because it is such a giant piece of fiberglass and you can't really fix it so it was very expensive you don't really want to hit anything in this car so let's talk a little bit about this color is this steel gray yes this was a 2002 only color that dodge made and my original plan was to get a red one but then i saw this color they only made 200 of them and i was like oh gotta buy this yeah and the iconic one that everyone talks about is the blue with

the white racing stripe so the blue and white stripes are what dodge used to do for all of its advertising and so that's another funny thing about it that's the most common color they made about four thousand of those but that's the one everyone wants so you can probably get between five and ten thousand dollars more for a blue and white versus one of these which is odd but interesting well how about this why don't we go take it for a spin let's do that all right let's go hey where's the where's

the seat belt it's on the inside oh what's it doing over there for some reason dodge put it on the inside only on the gts's the rt-10s have it on the outside oh i see okay so this poster that you had on your bedroom wall when you're a little kid was it this model no it was the rt10 actually from gen one so the original viper that had no windows it had a removable roof it was red because that was the color that everyone had in the posters and for the gen 2 one of the new features is the fixed ro

of right yes i believe what dodge did was the first model of the viper they designed was the gts but they started selling the rt-10 and then in 96 was when they came out with the official gts models which had this fixed roof and for some reason those are even though the rt10 came out first the gts is the iconic car you already mentioned some glitches to do with the viper is there anything here internally that is a little bit odd when you're one of the owners but one of my pet peeves is the air c

onditioning where half of the settings on the dial don't actually blow cold air which makes no sense when i first bought the car i was very unhappy that the air conditioning is not working and then i realized in the manual they're like no that's how it is and when you do blow cold as the coldest setting it's got this weird vent that blows air at your crotch for no reason which makes no sense dodge made a real mess dodge made a little dodgy car it's kind of hard to tell how much a viper is worth

so if you want a gen 3 wiper you could easily get one all day for 30k because gen 3s are kind of the red headed stepchild nobody really buys one because the gen 2 is the iconic shape and the gen 5 essentially copied that but gen 5's are pretty new so they're worth probably 70 to 120 based on spec what kind of reaction do you get when you're driving this car well you get a lot of thumbs ups on it i think everyone appreciates the viper the viper is a rare car even though they made almost forty tho

usand wipers i think thirty nine thousand total you don't really see them on the street i think i've seen maybe five or six in the last year and a half i love driving it makes me feel like a rock star i feel cool i don't know if i look cool but i feel cool and that's what you're paying money for it i guess and i even like saying you know let's take the viper glitch it sounds meaty it is really really fast it's got a lower differential that was part of this kit and it goes very fast in a straight

line it's got a surprising amount of grip the cornering it doesn't like hitting bumps mid corners but if you're on a really flat surface or like at all across it's fine at the track i would probably want to stay off the curbs a little bit so no rouge on this one huh probably not i'm we are fairly sure i'm not taking over flat in this car anytime soon thanks for hold i had an awesome time in my first dodge viper how can people keep in touch with you so if you guys would like to know more about d

odge viper ownership from a real viper owner feel free to hit me up on the throttle app or leave a message in the comments below and if you like this video please like it and share it on whichever networks you're on excellent and we've had so much bonus footage today that we've actually put it on the throttle app so be sure to download it today and please subscribe to our channel and hit the bell so you get notified when we upload new content so thanks for watching today and please join us next

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