(car engine revving)
- I went to start researching for this video
and learning about just what happened to this thing.
And I was hit with more threads
about how their SRT 4 just won't start,
or it would start
and then die after two seconds.
I'm not entirely sure why it's only two seconds,
but the forums don't lie
and single-handedly
the amount of time the car stays on
before turning themselves off is unanimously two seconds.
There was a time where our favorite mix-mash
like taking a bath
auto manufacturers in the United States,
built a properly crazy compact four cylinder turbo,
turbos important,
that quite literally walked the doors,
literally off everything it possibly could
while also losing the doors itself
because it wasn't intentionally really built that great.
But then it went away
and it didn't go away cause it was built like (expletive),
okay.
I'm Alex, Alexfi on Instagram
and today we're going to be talking about a car
that is one of the best sounding four cylinders ever made
in the history of the world.
Not just in the United States, in the world, okay.
We're talking about pow, all right,
we're talking about just who, just why,
and just what happened to the Dodge Neon SRT 4.
(dramatic music)
Wheels, tires, suspension, fitmentindustries.com,
and be sure to check it out,
plus add your damn car to the gallery if you haven't yet.
So we can just get like more cool cars
and then we can give you a shout on our socials.
Plus there's not really a lot of SRT 4s in there,
and I want to see if you're modifying when you should add it
so that I can take a peek at it,
wondering how you're dealing with the weird ass
bolt pattern that it's got.
And if you haven't dropped a comment yet,
be sure to do so.
You can either tell us what you'd like to see next,
or you can make fun of Sean.
There is no both, just for the record,
Team Clapped did win the last challenge.
Team Clean was too slow.
So let's jump into this.
There was a man by the name of Tom Gale.
He was the executive vice president of Chrysler
and went to SEMA in 1998,
saw that there was a metricon of sport compact cars
and quite literally just said to himself,
we need that.
And that was pretty much it.
He scattered around the warehouses of our favorite
high horsepower cars from Dodge
and Chrysler, making vehicles,
and settled on like the good,
the definitely compact,
the price efficient platform,
because that's what everybody else was doing.
He managed to mosey up over to Dodge
and the Neon as a shelf for this like future prodigy.
And that is really where this story began.
Now, Tom Gale was no slouch by the way.
I mean,
he put on the Dodge Viper concept vehicle
as the design chief.
He was the guy that really did take Dodge to the next level.
And if he knew how to make cars stupid, fast, scary,
and kind of sort of death traps,
and also buyable to the normal market,
it was our boy Gale, okay.
And it took Gale
and his team four months to make its first SRT,
which wasn't really called SRT at the time,
but that's fine.
It was boasting, not a turbo,
but an Eaton supercharger with 208 horsepower
and 180 foot pounds of torque.
And if that wasn't enough,
Galen empowered the team to quote unquote,
send it really drove it on a test track
for more than a thousand miles in just a two week period
and showed it the very next year at,
you guessed it, SEMA.
In a matter of 12 months, Tom Galen,
his team managed to take a concept idea on a Neon chassis
and turn it into a supercharged sport compact
that could walk the doors
off of everything you could possibly want.
And not only that, but people loved it.
They loved it. I loved it.
You loved it.
If you were in the early 2000s, you loved it, okay.
What is it? Who is this? Dodge?
Who are you? A modified Neon, affordable?
This was something that was pretty much unknown
to a lot of the people that were into
the tuner market at the time.
They were still kind of getting hit
with a lot of the '90s
and '80s cars specifically from Nissan.
And people didn't know that they could love a Dodge
until you saw it
and you're like, holy, that was pretty sick.
And it would be shown around
and loved by enough people that through a few iterations,
Tom Gale eventually started giving up his
crushy executive parking lot
to put the second ever SRT 4 ever made in its place
so that it would get more attention from its employees
and its staff so that people can try to actually
want to get behind it in terms of producing it.
There are four to five iterations
and some support from Dodge specialty vehicle engineering
to make it an actually green lit project,
because it was still not really getting the green light
from the good old execs upstairs.
A 2.4 liter would grace our presence in the engine bay,
which is also in the PTGT.
If you're wondering those are sick,
Sean had one and it was awesome.
I ran a 14 second quarter mile
for the very first time in that car.
And it would get a manual transmission, good springs.
Stop it.
And some suspension components overall,
and an interior that shook if you breathed on it wrong.
I'm serious, interior, not much there.
And by the way,
if you look at the SRT 10 seats
of the same year as the SRT 4,
you'll notice that there's a little bit of a copy,
paste thing happening there.
You can use it for your garage talk,
they're relatively very similar.
Just after four years in one night stand,
Tom had the idea at SEMA with the SRT 4,
it would actually go on sale
and it was the second fastest stock production vehicle
in the Chrysler Dodge lineup.
Only behind the big ass Viper.
It was a second fastest production car by Dodge at the time.
And the car released with 215 ponies,
a limited slip differential, larger fuel injection,
and 250 foot pounds of torque going to the front wheels.
It (expletive). It was so good.
It was awesome.
It was everything that you could want,
give or take the interior.
Without getting into too much of the nerdy details,
what Dodge was able to do
was to provide a proper power plant
without sacrificing too much liability
or making it as expensive as a Carrera.
And that took some serious science.
There really was a lot of nifty things they had to do
with the SRT 4 to make it affordable.
And also small.
The turbocharger had to be redesigned with Mitsubishi,
so it could include a compressor bypass belt,
right in the housing.
If you don't know,
that takes up additional space by combining it,
it condenses it,
it controls it,
it makes it a little bit easier
to kind of put a small space.
The manifold
and turbine housing were cast in one piece also
to improve the flow, stay small,
and reduce heat because they're in a tiny little ass space.
It also helped with production costs over time
because you're essentially making one piece versus two.
The SRT 4 was good and it won.
It won the SCCA Rally.
It ran pro rally.
It dominated group five, two wheel drive classes.
It won national road racing
and the US Touring Car Championship.
You don't want to sleep on this car.
Quote, it's not going to stay on the lot long, okay.
If you want this,
you're going to need to send me $200 down right now,
and you're never going to need to talk about it ever again.
The car single-handedly proved to Dodge
that creating a true SRT division would be worthy, it,
given the runway
and freedom to do some awesome yet kind of dumb (expletive).
And the SRT 4, the Neon,
really was the founding platform
that helped Dodge get to what we know
and love as the SRT nomenclature on the rest of their cars.
And I mean,
the SRT 4 had no trunk liner
and the interior really did feel like
one of those toys you get with like
the leftover tickets at an arcade game.
Like it's cool to look at,
but it ain't doing (expletive).
There's exposed bumper screws even.
And I mean,
the manual windows in the back
left the lot to be desired
by anyone that could afford something,
maybe just a little bit nicer,
from their folks over the, I don't know, ocean.
And while it took a little five years
to get it into a state where people like you
and people like me could actually buy it,
it only took a two full years in total
for it to inherently just die.
So what actually happened to it?
I mean, people liked it.
It was a properly good car.
Sure it had a couple of quirks
and features, but it's Dodge,
it's before Fiat.
They're always going to have weird things.
I mean,
did they stop making it because I beat it in a drag race
with my supercharge Dotson?
Play the clip!
(car engines revving)
Here's the thing with Dodge,
they weren't really doing that well,
coming to the top end of the early 2000s.
There was a lot going on in the late 2000s.
If you were around during that time,
there was a thing called a recession.
Recession sucked ass and it hurt a lot of people.
But was the writing on the wall?
A bit.
There were sales declining.
The impending doom of the recession
was known to a lot of these larger companies,
pretty far ahead of the curve.
They're trying everything in their power to try
and reduce the amount of impact
that this whole bubble pop on real estate
was going to do to them.
And while Dodge had the opportunity
to continue making one of the best, worst,
funniest cars ever made,
they axed it
and they replaced it with,
this, it's a Caliber.
You ever seen a Caliber before?
Exactly.
You've never seen an SRT Caliber
because nobody owns one anymore.
They only own the base model.
The Dodge Caliber is a front engine, front wheel drive,
compact hatchback that was intended to replace
the Dodge Neon
and the Chrysler PT Cruiser.
It literally took the worst of both things
and put them together
like a peanut butter and jelly sandwich.
And instead of it being peanut butter and jelly,
it was mayo and horseradish.
But it had a CVT, which was not well received,
but it had some PT Cruiser things,
which gave it slightly increased cargo space.
It was, and it did sell all right.
All right, let me get that out of the way,
it did sell okay.
But the SRT 4 for the Caliber had a little bit different
bite to it.
It had more power, more torque, more oomph.
I mean, Dodge really just tried to go more into everything,
which is a typical Dodge thing to do.
And it had a six beat, but it wasn't enough.
The SRT 4 Neon was intended to evolve with the Caliber,
but in 2008,
the car would go from selling 85,000 units or so
to 36,000 units,
almost getting carved above 50%.
And seeing that with Dodge going into the chapter bankruptcy
meant the bells
and whistles pretty much had to go
and any sort of model lineup
that wasn't going to make them clean cut dollars, okay.
2010 marked the disco of the Caliber SRT 4
with the following year
only selling 35,000 total units of the Caliber
in the United States.
Dodge was broke and nobody was buying this (expletive).
All right, so what happened to the SRT 4?
Well,
if you really want to break it down
into oversimplified nature,
it's because our parents were buying houses
that they couldn't afford,
and it caused a cool car to ultimately die,
not in its own skin,
but in the skin of a sport compact hatch
known as the Caliber.
There's a lot of assumptions made in that statement,
but if you were to culminate it all into one hook,
there it is.
But they are still properly good cars and I love them.
And while the SRT name died for a bit,
it did come back in the Cherokee, the TRX,
and of course the favorite, big burnout,
loving domestic friends.
And sure the recession did kill the line.
I mean,
really what it comes down to was
the recession killed the line.
It wasn't the fact that there was a lot of
interest reduction in the car
more than there was just no money.
But Chrysler
and Dodge were still learning how to make new generation
high horsepower cars.
This was like a test for them
as they were jumping back into it
with a newer generation of potential consumers
and the Caliber SRT 4, while,
a massive jump in power
and a better transmission experience,
had more torque steer than anyone could possibly want.
And the interior never really got better.
And the hyper-focus towards power,
which is something that's always kind of
sort of plagued Dodge,
but also was really helped Dodge,
has been kind of the issue
and the noise in that Caliber
and why it didn't do so well.
And it was just a little bit too much
back in the mid 2000s
when everybody was still kind of leaning towards
what the term upside down was
when you were referencing a house mortgage.
But what do you think about the SRT 4?
I absolutely love them
and they're neat and they make the best noises in the world.
And even as a front wheel drive car,
they are super fun
if you can find one for a good price.
The thing that gets a little weird on them
is the fact that they were on a odd bolt pattern
and you kind of are limited in options.
But if you're looking for wheels
for your newly acquired Neon, or just any car in general,
don't forget to check us out over at fitmentindustries.com.
If your looking for wheel
and tire packages that can get to your door
in as little as seven days, we got that.
Cause while everybody's talking about
wanting to sell (expletive)
and they don't got nothing
cause they dropped ship it all,
we just bought as much from possibly could
because we don't want to deal with
the customer service emails
and you guys being mad at us.
The Caliber was also cool when modified,
but there's only like two people that ever modified it.
(dramatic music)