Selling The Viper Costs As Much As Buying A Dart
Chrysler dealers hoping to sell the SRT Viper will have to pony up $25,000 – about the price of a loaded Dodge Dart – to be able to sell the supercar.
What does the $25 grand get you? The $25,000 fee is actually part of a two-tier system, outlined by Automotive News as such
“• For $5,000 each, any of the 2,347 Chrysler Group dealerships may buy a base agreement for tools, equipment, training, signs and, perhaps most important, preferential ordering and additional allocation of such vehicles as the Jeep Grand Cherokee SRT8, says Ralph Gilles, head of the SRT brand.
• For an additional $20,000, the high-performance agreement also permits dealers to sell the Viper.”
SRT boss Ralph Gillies described the typical SRT buyer as “…much higher income, much higher education levels…”, which could be marketing speak for “we’re not selling them to office cleaning company founders anymore”. Of course, the bit about “additional allocation of SRT Jeeps”, is an interesting clause too, isn’t it?
More by Derek Kreindler
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Ah, so now the creation of a standalone SRT brand makes more sense. Existing dealer franchise agreements are for specific brands. New brands, and cars sold under those new brands, aren't covered by existing contracts. If the dealers want to carry the new in-demand hot product, they're going to have to pay more. I wonder if Chrysler made dealers pony up when they rebranded the truck line to Ram.
why not have the customer order directly from Dodge and then have it delivered to a nearby dealer who in turns gets a small fee for the service?
$25K is not much. I recall the VW dealers' investment to sell the Phaeton (back in the day) was on the order of $100K.
Did they do this with the old Dodge Viper?