OTOF

Copyright 2001 The Financial Times Limited
Financial Times (London)


October 27, 2001, Saturday London Edition 1

SECTION: SPORT / MOTORING; Pg. 20

LENGTH: 746 words

HEADLINE: Will Crossfire hit the target?: MOTORING: Chrysler's concept car is dazzling critics. Michael Harvey assesses its chances of success

BYLINE: By MICHAEL HARVEY

BODY:
Chrysler's Crossfire concept car is alreadybeing talked of by industry observers as the next Audi TT. If you haven't come across Audi's must- have coupe 2 5 3 2 6 0 the TT is the appealingly odd, squashed bug-of-a-car so beloved of creative types and bankers who can't quite afford a Porsche.

There are streets in London's West End where there are more parked TTs than coffee shops and Audi assures me it isn't just a London phenomenon; wherever in the world there are car-conscious thirtysome- things, there are TTs.

To be dubbed the next TT, then, two years before going into production, is to be labelled a success a long way ahead. It is some accolade, but that's what many commentators are saying. Crossfire's credentials at least are beyond criticism. It will be built in Europe and not the US. Many of the usual questions about quality will therefore be redundant. Then there's the fact that Chrysler, America's No 3 carmaker, became part of DaimlerChrysler in 1999.

The Crossfire will be the first product from the conglomerate to use plenty of shared parts, which will also have to be acceptable to buyers of comparatively expensive Mercedes cars, rather than cheap Chryslers.

So there's a real possibility that this will be the highest-quality car yet to carry the Chrysler badge. It is to be assembled by Karmann, a German independent that also does contract work for Volkswagen, Audi's parent.

Yet what appears to be most exciting to Chrysler is that the Crossfire is being built at all. The company, groaning under hefty losses, is struggling to make headway in a difficult American market.

Even with shared components and contracted-out assembly, the Crossfire won't do much for Chrysler's bottom line. It simply won't be built in numbers large enough to do so.

Its job is to improve and modify Chrysler's public image in the way that a relatively small number of TT coupes have made all Audis seem a little less dour and, as a result, made Audi the fastest-growing luxury brand on the planet.

Compared with what's being asked of the Crossfire, the TT's role at Audi was a simple tune-up. Faced with an onslaught of imports that are better built, better equipped, better designed and better value, the American car is possibly in terminal decline.

Chrysler has been here before. In the 1990s, before the takeover by Daimler and under the charismatic product leadership of Americans Bob Lutz and Tom Gale, Chrysler reinvented the saloon car with an architectural school they called "cab forward".

Cab forward moved the windscreen pillars much farther down the bonnet, with the aim of devoting less space to hardware and more to humans. By and large it was hokum. The cars had such low-slung roofs, passengers were obliged to sit almost prone and so any extra legroom was taken up by the need to stretch the legs out. At least the cars did have big boots, however.

In the 1990s, much of what Chrysler did was hype, and there are no better examples of this than the Crossfire's spiritual predecessors, the Dodge Viper and the Ply-mouth Prowler. The Viper was, and still is, a priapic roadster of boastful proportions; the Prowler, a pret-a -porter hot-rod for those who couldn't get over the 1950s.

Both, like the Crossfire, started life as concept cars. Both are fantastic cars capable of delivering a unique experience on the road for very little money. Both generated huge interest and goodwill for Chrysler and the brand names they carried, Dodge and Plymouth. (Plymouth, however, did not have the product to follow through on the promise of the Prowler and was shut down by DaimlerChrysler.)

The Crossfire is an attempt to try to recapture some of the magic. By giving the go-ahead to produce the Crossfire, we are supposed to believe that Chrysler's new German management has the same love of the product and the same instincts as the previous management, which had briefly made the company the world's most profitable and most exciting.

But at this stage the Crossfire, a few details aside, does not have the chutzpah or presence of either of its image-leading predecessors, and there is much work to be done to give it the crowd-pulling power that will revitalise Chrysler's fortunes.

For the Crossfire is no new TT and that should bother Chrysler's management. Before he joined DaimlerChrysler, Freeman Thomas, the designer of the Crossfire, worked for Audi. No prizes for guessing which car he designed there.

jackTTar

I think not!!! Thoughs are fight'in words, LOL.

PGTT

It really does not do anything for me... unlike the TT when I first saw the prototype, I literally freaked out!

<img src="http://www.edmunds.com/media/2001/naias/chrysler.crossfireconcept.r3-4.350.jpg">
<img src="http://www.edmunds.com/media/2001/naias/chrysler.crossfireconcept.f3-4.350.jpg">

HACK THS

and turn out to be another piece of crap on the road- unlike our TT's of course.

JBW

I almost choked on my beer that was so on the money. There are two cars I'd prefer to the TT --a Boxster S and a 911. I can't afford either.

TRM

Honda was doing it for years and the Chrysler marketing geeks just put a fancy spin on it to sell more cars...what a load of junk.

RBH

Chrysler have a pretty good reputation for taking show cars to road cars with the concept pretty much 'in tact'. I wouldn't be surprised if it got built pretty much as per the concept.