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 truly amazing features or rather lack of features which i'll show you in a few minutes it's also terrifying because this car has no electronic aids or nannies or safety measures to keep you from killing yourself it is a high performance car in the truest sense of the term the old school sense and today i'm going to review it [Music] before i get started be sure to check out cars and bids which is my new online enthusiast car auction website that's been hugely successful with some amazing recent sales including this cadillac cts-v wagon which sold for 56 000. and this 1993 mercedes 400 e amg which sold for 37 000. if you're looking to get the most money for your cool car sell it on cars and bids i've borrowed this viper from the peterson museum here in los angeles the peterson museum has one of the greatest car collections ever assembled at any point and if you're in los angeles and you want to see basically anything and everything that's cool that has to do with cars the peterson museum is the place to go to see it check out the peterson by clicking the link in the description below so let's talk viper the viper was originally conceived in the late 1980s as sort of a modern-day shelby cobra a small two-seat sports car with a massive engine and basically nothing else now over the years the viper added more luxuries and features to keep up with consumer demand but when it first came out in 1992 this car it had basically nothing this car doesn't have windows but it does have 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 about a foot and a half longer than a miata now the viper only came one way 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 not surprisingly consumers eventually began to demand luxuries and features that the original viper didn't have and like i mentioned it later added those luxuries and features to make buyers happy but to me it kind of lost the purpose of the ultra focused original viper and so this is the ultra focused original viper and today i'm going to show you around it and show you all of its interesting quirks and features there are many then i'm going to get it out on the road and drive it and then i'm going to give it a dug score all right i'm going to start the quirks and features of the viper by discussing some of the features that it doesn't have now the purpose of this car was to make a simple back to basic sports car so they wanted to engineer out all of the distractions and stupid stuff you don't need but it's amazing how far they took that for instance you know how your car has door handles yeah well the viper didn't at least not on the outside you can look out here there's no door handle to be found instead if you wanted to open the door from the outside you had to reach into the interior door handle pull it and that would open up the door and that was the only way in from the outside now i know what you're thinking well what happens when the windows are rolled up so you can't easily reach in and get to the interior door handle then how do you get in and the answer to that is this car doesn't have windows either you can see on the door panel there's no window in there and there's no crank or switch to roll the window up this car is so back to basics that it doesn't even have windows which is a pretty impressive thing to eliminate now i have to admit that the viper didn't technically have no windows at all instead every single original viper was delivered with this black bag and inside this black bag was this thing which was the window check this out you wanted to install the window you actually had to physically lift it into place and then clip it into these little clips in the door and then it would go in and that was how you put the window on your viper you didn't just roll it up you had to literally install it in place but anyway back to the earlier question okay if these windows are in place then how do you get in how do you reach in and open the door and the answer is even though you could install these windows and get them in here they're plastic and they're surrounded by a zipper which you could unzip from the outside so even if the windows were in place and the roof was on these cars also came with a cloth roof you could just walk up unzip the window and then reach in and open up the door using the interior door handle so there was pretty much no security at all with these early vipers another feature that they deemed wasn't necessary and that lack of security extended beyond the interior and to the hood all right now in your car you want to get into the hood there's a little latch on the driver's foot while you pull it and it pops open and when you have the doors locked nobody can get to that latch and get into your engine bay not so with the original viper in 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 on a little latch and then it pops up and from there you can open it all the way which i'll show you in a few minutes security was not really something that was thought to be important for this car with that said it wouldn't have really 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 does have door locks but there's no keyhole on the outside where you can lock it so the only way to lock the doors is by reaching in locking them and then walking away but if you could reach in to lock the doors and walk away then a thief could easily reach in to unlock the doors and get access to the car and do pretty much whatever they want so the car was never really locked even when it was locked again security was not really a big consideration with the viper and by the way speaking of security and the key have a look at it this one's been duplicated but you can see it's just a simple early 90s chrysler key nothing unusual or special here just one of the many frills and features that they removed in order to make the viper as basic and simple as possible and next up we move inside the viper where there are quite a few more interesting features that were left off in pursuit of a back to basics shelby cobra style sports car for instance right behind the seats you can see there is a roll bar now a lot of convertibles have this it's taller than your head so if you roll over it'll make sure you don't have a severe head injury except there's a warning label next to the roll bar that specifically says this top support is not a roll bar and then it says ominously this is an open vehicle please drive carefully in other words this thing ain't going to save you if you roll over so don't crash because you'll die that's a nice warning label to see and a lot more stuff was left off than just that you know how your car has air conditioning yeah this one doesn't this car also doesn't have any storage in the door panel for a wallet or paperwork nothing and there's no center console storage in this car either doesn't exist and there's no storage 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 vapor owners would rather drive around blast and music than store stuff now in terms of storage this car did have a glove box so from the passenger side the usual location and it was a fairly large glove box but it came at the expense of airbags this car had none none for the passenger nor for the driver that sort of heavy unnecessary safety feature was simply deemed superfluous no point adding it to the viper but it wasn't just a lack of features and creature comforts that made it clear this was intended to be a back to basic sports car with a focus on performance and nothing else there were some more obvious places you could look in this interior for that message including just how cheap it is in here take a look for instance at the door pole you can see exposed screws inside it this was an expensive car back when it was new exposed screws just look so crappy and there's more of them on top of the dashboard just exposed screws that keep stuff together again it looks terrible and cheap but that's what they did and beyond that just the materials in this car in general looked so cheap you had the crappiest cheapest plastic that chrysler could find everywhere in this interior nothing was nice nothing looked good nothing was high-end like you would expect from an expensive v10 exotic sports car that was even true of the radio the viper didn't get some cool special high-end radio so you could really crank the music you got this standard chrysler head unit doesn't even say dodge on it it says chrysler the parent company so they could cheaply put it in vehicles from all their brands and that included the viper just this crappy generic chrysler stereo but here's the thing all those features this car doesn't have all the obvious cost cutting in this interior that was kind of the point of this car again it was supposed to be a modern day shelby cobra something you got in drove got the tail out listened to the v10 the rest of the stuff didn't matter all that much so it was fine to cheap out in the interior and not put very obvious usable door handles in the car nobody buying this car cared about that stuff 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 kind of a car around it too because they had to and next up beyond the cheapness and the lack of features a few other interesting quirks in this interior one is between the two gauges you can see there's a smaller center gauge that's black this is where all of your warning lights were your check engine light your parking brake light you also had an upshift light in here you might be able to see the outline of it it would tell you when to up shift for optimal fuel economy if that was something you wanted to do with your viper and speaking of optimal fuel economy in your viper this car had a skip shift feature meaning that if you were going pretty slowly not accelerating hard and you were getting out of first it would guide you to fourth gear in order to save gas and improve your fuel economy so the viper with its eight liter v10 would lock you out of second and put you into fourth in most normal driving circumstances in order to increase your gas mileage ridiculous and next up another interesting viper interior quirk was getting the key out of the ignition it wasn't as simple as just turning the car off and pulling the key out like in most modern cars instead there's a little lever that you had to push down while you were pulling the key out in order to make sure you were absolutely certain you wanted to turn off the car and take out the key so you didn't accidentally do that while you were driving i love that this car has no traction control stability control analog brakes airbags but they do have a safety guard in place to make sure you don't accidentally pull out the key while you're on the interstate that's a good one and next up here's a rather interesting quirk of the original viper the seat belt location because the belts are on the door you can see with the door open the seat belt opens with the doors which is very bizarre and seems tremendously unsafe if the doors are deformed in an accident or if they fly off your seat belt is going with them usually it's mounted to some fixed point in the car but in the early viper it's on the door now i owned 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 next up speaking of one more safety concern in this car as if it needed any more that would be the exhaust placement which was right below the doors now this doesn't seem all that bad at first you get to hear the engine sound when you're driving it seems cool except when you get out of the car this whole panel is tremendously hot and so it was very common people with early vipers would get out and burn their ankles because they accidentally touched the exhaust which was sitting right there in an unusual location chrysler did put a giant warning label in the door sill reminding you not to do this but obviously most people don't really look at that and there were a lot of burns anyway and next up moving outside the original viper a couple of interesting points stand out from this angle one is the fact that the exterior look with no door handles is pretty cool i make fun of this car for having to reach in and open the doors but you got to admit it looks clean and beautiful with no door handles so to an extent i'm glad that they did it this way another thing i really like from this angle is the wheels i have always loved the three spoke wheels from the original vipers now a lot of viper people think they look stupid or they're too small and they upgrade them or change them but to me this was the auto show car these wheels in this color this is how the viper looks in my opinion and everyone since then has just been a variation on the original and iconic theme which is this car with these wheels now speaking of the wheels i should 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 generally because this is a special viper like i mentioned the fifth one built and if you look at the then you can see zero zero zero five this is the fifth viper off the assembly line for the 92 model year and in fact it's a little more special than that because this was technically a pre-production car was never offered to the public instead it was used to introduce the viper to dealerships 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 gotta tell you hundreds of car dealers driving a no traction control v10 new super exotic sports car we're lucky that this vehicle survived at all but it did viper number five and next we move on to the front of the viper there are a few interesting quirks and features worth noting one thing i have always loved is the badge on this car which is of course a snake a viper but the cool thing is that the material of the badge actually looks like a snake's skin which is a really neat touch something you would only see if you look closely but a nice piece of attention to detail next up one other interesting item up here you can see it very well from your angle that is the grill the viper doesn't really have a grill in the traditional sense but it has this very low one in the bumper and you can see there's this crosshair design that's because all dodge models at the time had the crosshairs and they were trying to tie the viper into the rest of the product line and that's why it looks like this in the front just so everybody knew this wasn't just a viper it was also a dodge and their thinking was maybe people would see this and think dodge was cool and then go out and buy a ram or an intrepid and next up i want to show you the engine but first that requires opening the hood which is no easy feat this is one of the largest single panels on a production car and you have to be pretty careful with it so to open it up like i showed you before you first reach under here there's a little hood latch you pull it and that gets the hood to this point from here there's another latch in the front you have to carefully push the hood down pull it around and then the hood is in this position but that's the easy part next you have to come around to the back of the hood and pull it up ideally in the middle to an extent to make sure it doesn't flex and then it's up and you can check out the engine in the viper and so let's check out the engine like i've said this is an 8 liter v10 400 horsepower 465 pound-feet of torque a massive engine cover hides a massive engine it really is a huge power plant and i've always loved just how shelby cobra like this car was just take a simple small sports car throw on a ridiculously oversized engine and see what happens and in this car what happened in a lot of cases was severe accidents because it was such a dangerous and powerful car to drive now speaking of the engine i've also always loved that it's red it just looks so performancy and muscly even underneath the engine cover it is a really really cool engine to see and it's always a treat when you can lift up the giant hood in the viper and speaking of the giant hood in the viper it's time to close it closing it is easier than opening it but you still have to be pretty careful you just guide it down slowly and it kind of finds its home you get it into this position then you come back around to the front and push it down and it latches closed and then the engine is again concealed in your viper ready for anyone to walk up and open it from the outside and finally we move on to the back of the viper and i want to talk about the trunk to open it you have to stick the key in twist it and then open it up there is no trunk popper because of course why would there be now the interesting thing about this trunk is when you open it it doesn't stay open it will actually close again just underscoring how basic this car is to keep the trunk open there's a prop like there is in most cars under the hood you put the prop in place and only then will the trunk stay up but once you've done that you can see the trunk has no lining there's no carpet in here again just a basic simple car with no luxuries at all you do get a tire jack which is a nice feature and i think at one point there was a temporary tire in here but it's gone but either way that's the trunk in the original viper nothing nice at all you just were lucky that you got a trunk in the first place frankly and finally one last item worth noting back here something i've always loved in the back of the viper would be its badges there was no room anywhere in the back to really put badges so dodge decided to put them on the bumper facing 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 and so those are the quirks and features of the 1992 dodge viper the fifth viper ever made now it's time to get it out on the road and see how it drives all right driving the 92 viper no pressure here this is just a museum car and the fifth viper ever made no big deal i gotta tell you i feel right at home driving this car i owned a 97 viper gts made some videos with that you might remember and this feels pretty similar in a lot of ways especially the clutch the shifter that sort of thing but to me the 92s the early vipers were always the the peak viper this was how the car was intended and they had to kind of soften it in later years to meet customer demand but this is how the car was supposed to be with no windows and no air conditioning this is the viper giving it a little gas here these are just cool the thing about these cars is they're not all that fast by modern standards they're really just not uh 400 horsepower not that big of a number anymore even with the v10 and the small size but they're just so pure they're so pure you get in this car and there's no bs windows roof you don't need any of that crap it's just a pure rear-wheel drive two-seat wide roadster with a v10 and that's the coolest thing about this car and as much as i do like later vipers and i think the latest acr one is so insane and later vipers were all great it's just not the same this car was a totally different experience than any viper that came after it now sitting in a stop light the you get the sense that this car is like caged heat so many modern exotics are very quiet and very relaxed at a stop light not this thing it's shaking it's rattling it's doing its thing you can feel vibrations to the steering wheel the gear lever that's the point that's what this car does and that was what it was it was just a v10 bolted to a chassis and you just kind of dealt with it i also love how everything in here is just the crappiest stuff they could find it is so bad the trim the quality of the materials but i love it because that's the purpose of the car you get into some cars an e-class and the interior's not that nice it's like what is this but you're missing the viper wasn't intended to be that the thing i like about this car was they didn't care about any of this stuff they didn't need it to look nice or to feel good inside or have the nicest stuff like a porsche and later the viper evolved to a point where they did do that and it kind of ruined some of what the car originally was about now it became a different car and that was fine but this was just a pure back to basics car in the form of a vehicle that probably will never be made again like this at least from a major automaker one thing i've always liked about the viper is it's actually pretty easy to drive reasonably it's got a fairly easy clutch fairly easy accelerator gear lever all that stuff it's really not all that difficult as long as you're rational about it now where you get into trouble with vipers is when you start to push it and suddenly its easiness and its approachability everything just flips and it can flip in an instant and really really go crazy on you and that's how so many of these got put away and seriously damaged ultimately you have a 3000 pound car with absolutely no traction control or stability control of any variety uh with a v10 up front and they weren't that expensive so a lot of people got them and just kinda didn't really know what they were doing had never driven a car like this before and they crashed them and things did not go well it is amazing that this car ever got green lighted for production nothing like this would ever be manufactured in today's world giving it a little gas here it hauls and it hauls pretty well it feels reasonably fast but i think the real excitement is the sensation of speed you get because you're so low so close to the road uh and just kind of so not removed you're such a part of the experience and so that's the 1992 dodge viper this is a truly amazing car mainly because it seems like something that would have come out of the 1960s no comforts no features all engine and horsepower and yet it came out of the 90s probably the very last car like this that will ever come from a major automaker it's amazing to check out the original viper and to see how it was and now it's time to give the original viper a doug score starting with the weekend categories and styling the viper looks cool not necessarily classically beautiful but cool and gets a 7 out of 10. acceleration 0-60 is in the high 4s and it gets a 6 out of 10. handling is reasonably sharp and it gets a 6 out of 10. fun factor is pretty high this car isn't incredibly fast or powerful but it's such a hoot given the total lack of driver raids and it gets a 7 out of 10. cool factor is also high especially for the early rt10 in red it was a viper icon and it gets a 7 out of 10 for a total weekend score of 33 out of 50. next up are the daily categories and features this car has basically nothing only the absolute bare bones basics and it gets a two out of ten comfort is also a disaster the seats are nice but otherwise it's harsh and you might melt yourself getting out it gets a two out of ten quality is only okay replacement parts for this car are cheap but you'll be needing them because it simply wasn't built that well in the first place the materials are just crap and it gets a 4 out of 10. practicality is bad it's laughably impractical with no real windows but at least it has two seats and it gets a 2 out of 10. finally value and i think these are amazing values especially the red 92s with three spoke wheels these are iconic american sports cars and i can't believe they still haven't gotten more expensive you can pick one of these up for like 30 grand which is a total bargain and it gets a 9 out of 10 for a total daily score of 19 out of 50. add it up and the doug score is 52 out of 100 which places the viper here against relevant sports cars from this era it ties the 1997 viper gts the blue and white car i owned the gts is a bit better in virtually every way but the rt10 is a bit cooler and a bit better value since it's more of an icon overall these older vipers are fun exotic cars you can buy cheap and service pretty cheap too and i can't believe they're not even more popular with enthusiasts you

Channel: Doug DeMuro

Views: 2,528,355

Rating: 4.8735366 out of 5

Keywords:

Id: mZ8rhpxVpqs

Length: 28min 5sec (1685 seconds)

Published: Thu Jan 14 2021

Reddit Comments

[u/pryan886]

During this era “passive” safety was a requirement. Automakers had two ways to comply:

-Airbags

-Automatic seatbelts

Mounting seatbelts on the door was a clever workaround to sidestep installing those annoying seatbelts on rails. They moved the attach points to the door so you COULD technically enter and exit with out unbuckling. Then they labeled the buckle as an emergency release.

This satisfies the requirements of having seatbelts that don’t need to be buckled by the occupant. They are “unbuckled” by opening the door and “buckled” by closing the door.

No one actually used them like that, but that’s why they were mounted on the door.

[u/stakoverflo]

Wow, I've often heard of this thing as a "widow maker" and I knew it obviously makes a shit load of power and has no ABS or traction control and things like that, but that "Drive carefully" sticker is something else. Amazing.

[u/nukelauncher95]

Fun fact: The Viper has had 3 logos. 1992-2002 was Sneaky Pete. 2003-2010 was Fangs. 2013-2017 was Stryker.

Another fun fact: Fangs looks like Daffy Duck if you flip it upside down

[u/Jeremyx2]

I worked as a valet during college, first time I drove one of these I burned the crap out of my leg getting out.

Still have the scar.

[u/Bamres24]

Doug is given a white, edgeless filming studio and sets up an angle that shows off the set LOL

[u/LincolnClayFace]

Pretty much any super car pre 2000 was a violent dangerous beast actively trying to kill its driver. The Diablo sticks out in my mind personally

[u/Michelanvalo]

I feel like if a manufacturer showed up with a car like this to NHTSA for safety testing they'd be laughed out of the building.

Also /u/doug-demuro what auto museums have you been to that are memorable?

[u/erix84]

As much as I love the Viper, it's the car that got me into cars, I'm not sure I'd ever want a first gen RT/10 like this... I mean, this thing is in a museum, and it's got ripped weatherstripping and stuff (can see some at 8:40).

I think the first gen GTS is the one I'd actually want, or a second gen RT/10.

[u/pryan886]

No windows? Useless locks?

Seems like the early 90s Viper could benefit from an early 90s Viper car alarm.

Beep boop beep boop. Gong gong gong. Aweeeeoooo aweeeooooo. Ack. Ack. Ack.