The first Viper concept debuted at the 1989 NAIAS, followed by prototypes; the late-1989 VM01 was powered by the 360 V8, but a V10 was already planned. The early-1990 VM02 was powered by the 8-liter V10. The original V10 was reportedly built with the involvement of Lambourghini, which was partly owned by Chrysler at the time; the basic engineering was of course Chrysler’s, since it was based on the venerable 360, but Lamborghini worked on the cooling system, crankshaft balance, weight reduction, and fine tuning; the Italian automaker’s expertise in aluminum was also tapped, since the Viper had an aluminum block to save roughly 150 pounds of weight. Unique features of the Viper version of the V-10, versus the truck engine, included a low-profile cross-ram intake with dual throttle bodies, the manifolds, oil pan, heads, and accessory drive; the compression ratio was raised, the pistons lightened, the maximum engine speed increased, the valves enlarged, the rods and crank strengthened. In the end, few components were shared with the truck engine.

The 2008 Viper had similar consultations from McLaren Performance (not to be confusing with the McLaren racing people who work with Mercedes).

The Viper, at its introduction to the public, was intended to be two things to the corporation. The public version was that Chrysler needed a halo car to show they were still the best at building a low cost vehicle of any type and beating the old Shelby Cobra 0-100-0 times was a showman's way of achieving just that. Privately (and more importantly), within the corporation, the Viper was a production technique test bed- to see if the corporation really could develop new methods of manufacture and assembly to lower the cost of a vehicle. It was originally intended to be killed off and a totally different vehicle replace it in the 1997 model year.

If you take a look under the skin of a 1st generation Viper, it was a crude and rude "kit car," similar to what home builders had been building for years in Cobra replicas. Chrysler (actually JTE engineers working on their own time) translated this into a vehicle and production line that, in one fell swoop, became the most sought after assignment in the corporation up to that point.