How Much Horsepower Does A 20-Year-Old Dodge Viper Make Now?

Pretty much all cars lose power over time, regardless of how well they’re maintained. As a car racks up the miles, engine parts wear and don’t work quite as well as they did when they left the factory.

Doug DeMuro decided to test how much horsepower his 20-year-old Dodge Viper GTS now has, to see how far off the original figure it is. As he explains, the second-gen Viper was made by the Chrysler group in the 1990s, and at the time, the firm wasn’t renowned for precision accuracy. Each individual engine will probably have a slight horsepower difference, but the official figure for the Viper was 450bhp from an 8.0-litre V10. And there’s plenty of lovely V10 noise in this video.

We’re not going to spoil the outcome, but suffice to say, it seems the original power figure might have been a tad conservative…