Dodge Viper to be axed in 2017, five final editions planned



The Dodge Viper, an iconic combination of sports and muscle car in one package, will meet its end after a quarter of a century. Fiat-Chrysler Automobiles (FCA) announced that next year will be the final production year for this brutish American car.

As a final sendoff, Dodge will unveil a series of limited-production, special-edition models. The five mentioned models (from left to right as per the picture above), are as follows:

Viper Snakeskin Edition GTC: Receives a Snakeskin Green job, SRT stripes, and customised interiors. 25-unit only.

Voodoo II ACR: Black with grey stripe, receives an aero kit, and carbon ceramic brakes. 31-unit only.

Viper GTS-R Commemorative Edition ACR: Receives white exterior paint complemented with matching dual blue stripes. Gets the most allocation with 100 cars.

Viper 1:28 ACR: Black exteriors with a wide red stripe. Named after ACR’s Laguna Seca lap record. 28-unit only.

Dealer Edition ACR (not pictured here): Painted in white with a blue center stripe and red driver’s stripe. Allocated for two Dodge dealers with the highest sales of the Viper models. 33-unit only.

In its most recent form, the SRT Viper is powered by an 8.0-litre V10 lump that outputs 640 hp and 813 Nm of torque and mated with the one and only six-speed manual transmission. Over its 25 years of existence, there were countless versions of the Viper. Sadly, FCA is no longer seeing the business justification of preserving an assembly line of 75-people for a small but expensive production.

Though its days are numbered, CEO Sergio Marchionne has hinted that the Viper could be revived via a shared FCA platform. That said, in the age where performance is boosted by forced induction and electrification, the days of raw power could be a thing of the past, which makes these five final editions of Vipers worthwhile.