There will always be something special about driving a purpose-built sports car the way it was meant to be driven, but there’s also something incredibly enjoyable about using a car for the opposite of its intended purpose. I mean, did I have a blast driving a Mazda Miata through the Malibu canyons? Absolutely. Did I have a different kind of fun hustling a regular ole Honda Civic along those same roads? You bet I did. So, of course, when we first saw the off-road Viper, I got excited. But would you believe me if I told you there are also some downsides to off-roading a Dodge Viper?
Don’t worry, you don’t have to take the word of a mostly irrelevant car blogger on that one — not when we have a new video from our old buddy SuperfastMatt to talk all about it. As the owner and builder of the off-road Viper, he probably knows a thing or two about off-roading his own Viper, and overall, he says, “It’s great. It’s mostly great.” Then again, that statement is also immediately followed by the caveat, “The stuff I did to it is great. All the Dodge stuff? Not so great.”
Yeah… that’s to be expected. Even by Dodge standards, early Vipers were a master class in corner-cutting. As SuperfastMatt put it, “Dodge made these with pretty much no budget. The parts are cheap, the development was hasty, and the durability testing was minimal. So, obviously, it’s not going to be the best car to tear down washed-out dirt roads or do or do donuts in the sand. It has limitations, and I’m finding all of them.”
That may not be the best thing for Matt, personally, but it does make for some great content for us, the viewers.
More off-road Viper problems
According to Matt, he recently took the off-road Viper on a little off-road adventure with some friends, but this video isn’t about off-road adventuring. At least not really. Instead, it’s about something much more important: complaining. For example, the hood is way too long for proper off-roading, and it’s also not what you might call “securely attached to the car,” which, as you can probably imagine, is sometimes an issue when you’re bouncing around on unpaved roads in your off-road Viper.
The hood issue also led to some paint cracking, although upon further investigation, that may not have been Dodge’s fault. It looks like the front fender, where the cracks are the worst, was probably repainted at some point with paint that did a good job of matching the car’s original color but was never intended to be used on a part that flexes as much as a body panel does. Oh well.
There were also plenty of other smaller problems to fix, from leaking hoses to the lack of a cupholder, but the real fun starts when you get to the part where he decides to swap the stock radio out for an aftermarket Apple CarPlay unit. Stripping out an entire interior still counts as “fun” these days, right? Plus, how else are you going to clean all the dust from your previous off-roading adventures without stripping the entire interior? And once everything’s out, why not swap out a few parts you don’t like for something better?
The best part, though, is probably when he accidentally breaks one of the tabs on a headlight switch. That’s because, upon closer inspection, it ends up being a Ford-branded switch. Presumably, Dodge couldn’t even be bothered to spring for the unbranded version, so it just got the one its supplier was already making for Ford in bulk. Now that’s some corner-cutting.
