The Chrysler 200 Goes Under the Knife - and Comes out Pretty

Chrysler's 200 has, since it's introduction in 2012, had a problem. And that problem was the headlight design. The headlights are ghastly on the current model. Almost literally laughable.

In one of our first posts here, Auto Styling News eviscerated the 200 for this and other sins, but mostly the sin of actively advertising this vehicle as 'distinctive' and having funny little eyebrows, and a grille "that's shaped just like the interior clock," somehow made it so. To have "luxury car" pretensions, and have such a glaring mistake right there on the front of the car seemed unforgivable.

In fact, the car's introductory ad itself was called "Why do the headlights have eyebrows?" Why, indeed. (The video screenshot below doesn't do justice to the silliness that ensues when one of these is seen on the road.)

The sad part about the 2011 re-do of the Sebring is that the rest of the car looked pretty good. The rear was very attractive and the proportions were fine.

Anyway, let's just say all is forgiven. The 2015 model, released at the Detroit Motor Show this week, is a far better looking vehicle on many levels.

The headlights, along with the entire grille, has been refurbished, and now has the class that was sorely lacking on the 2011-14 models. The well proportioned Chrysler "wing" logo is now more prominent as well, and gives the car a proper identity.

Had they stopped there, the company would receive great plaudits from this quarter and many others, I'm sure. But they kept going, and tweaked the entire vehicle (which is now built atop a Fiat chassis.)

The rear end - which they actually got right on the previous 200 - also received a completely facelift, and while the rear spoiler from a certain angle seems to give it a bit of a "duck face" (or duck's a**?) it's tolerable. And while the previous tail lights were just fine, the new ones are certainly appropriate, if not a bit hum-drum.

The side view also looks completely different, and this yields one of the few criticisms, since it looks a lot like most other cars on the road, and it is not at all distinctive.



The rear looks a bit like a Hyundai and one could mistake the profile for a Lexus or even (if you squint) a Jaguar F series. Which isn't a bad mistake for a car seeking to enter "luxury" status (and a $21k luxury car would certainly be welcome.)

With this complete re-think, Chrysler shows that it's serious about reaching into the luxury market - or at least that it knows how to recover when it makes a mistake, and the previous 200 was a big one.

It's too early to say whether the 200 can actually compete with the luxury brands it hopes to take on, or whether it's rather anonymous styling makes it more of a competitor with the Hyundai's and KIA's of the world. But at least it's now a full competitor.

Ad Writers for the Chrysler 200 Need To Win An Award. The Razzie.

2011 Chrysler 200 Commercial - Why do the headlights have eyebrows?
by Stephen Abbott

“Why do the headlights have eyebrows? Why is the shape of the grille like the shape of the clock? Why do the gauges appear to be floating? Why does it seem like the grille is always smiling? Because the details are everything.”

Seriously? Seriously, Chrysler? This is actually what you’re presenting to the American public as a car commercial in the second decade of the Twenty-First Century?

Very, very sad. And insulting, frankly.

The new Chrysler 200 – for which this nonsense was written and was actually FILMED for a national TV ad – is far from a luxury car. Though, to be fair, it’s far from the worst car Detroit has ever made. Chrysler wins a few awards for those, too, especially the crap they put out in the 1990s. But let’s not go there. This time.

Let’s get back to this ad. Eyebrows? Really?

Okay, when I think of eyebrows on a car’s headlamps, I’m thinking about an Audi. And they do it beautifully. Even though it’s more like eyeliner when they do it. But that doesn’t matter. The LED lights on the A8 gently curve under the large, well-defined and well-designed headlamps, giving the front end at once a sinister and aggressive stance. Combined with a wide, aggressive grille, the Audi A8 looks like, and is, a force to be reckoned with. That’s even before the engine springs to life.

But the 200? It’s grille is admittedly meant to be “always smiling,” so right off the bat, one knows aggression isn’t supposed to be a trait of this vehicle. And the fact that these are happy eyebrows dancing above these plain-Jane headlights further signals that the target market isn’t men, it’s women.

And while it’s just peachy that the ever-grinning grille is shaped EXACTLY like the arguably pretty pearl-backed clock on the dash, I’m sorry, Chrysler, but those gauges do NOT appear to be floating. The ones I have seen, and as we can plainly see in the ad, are plain-Jane gauges. But their ad writers got paid to come up with some dazzling crap to write about this loser of a vehicle, and that’s what they came up with. Thanks, guys, for the 30 seconds of hype.

I could see these poor guys now, huddled midway through an all-nighter, scratching their heads about this bland, boring Blahmobile: “People, people, come on! It’s GOT to have a feature we can blow into something interesting.”

One finally must have said: “Wait, show me those pictures again. Yeah! The grille is kinda shaped like the clock. Let’s mention that!”

“That’s great!” says the head writer in relief. “And let’s throw in Bob’s idea about the grille smiling and Doug’s thing about beautiful eyebrows.”

One wonders: do they want ANY men to buy this car?

Chrysler may want to imply that their car looks like an expensive Bentley with its standard equally expensive Breitling clock inside that also sort of “matches the shape of the grille” but… no.

The ad fails to mention the only pleasant feature of the 200 - its rear. It instantly reminds me of the superbly handsome 2012 Ford Taurus, with its long chrome band that incorporates oval corporate logo. The tail lamps of the new Taurus were borrowed from the Ford Interceptor show car and instantly give it class. But let’s wake from that wet dream back to the nightmare of 200.

I do sympathize with the ad writers’ dilemma of having to “sell” this rather lame “luxury” vehicle, which is the replacement for arguably more beefy and attractive Sebring. That car had, by the late 2000s, begun to sport aggressive headlamps and large, IN YOUR FACE tail lamps, along with punchy, Crossfire-like creases flowing from the windscreen to the attractive front-end grille.

The problem was never with the looks, IMO, though they could have been toned down if that was a problem. The issue was always with the spindly, wimpy engines that were grossly unreliable, sending them by the hundreds of thousands straight into the fleets of Enterprise and National Car Rental lots in sleepy airports across the nation.

A new grille and fancy clock on the 200 is a bland answer to a “does the curtain match the drapes” question that wasn’t being asked by anyone.

There's Something Horribly Wrong Over at Chrysler

It's pretty bad when the entire advertising and marketing campaign strategy for a car company's lineup of vehicles is based on the idea of keeping them in the shadows as much as possible.

That seems to be Chrysler's strategy, especially with its Sebring replacement, the 200, which debuted in a much-ballyhooed commercial during this year's Super Bowl. As you remember, rap star Eminem hyped the poorly photographed car traveling amongst the ruins of Detroit touting the benefits not so much of the car but of the city - which is about as prosperous today as is Kandahar or Benghazi.

The missing element was the car, which was filmed at night and in severe close-ups. At the time, I thought this was a "teaser" and that we'd get to see more of the car in future ads. Well, this ad was all we'd see, and shorter versions of it have been the sum total of what we've seen of the 200.

Good thing, it turns out. In one of our first blog posts here, we exposed the true and hideous nature of this car, which frankly looks worse than the Sebring, or at least just as cheap.

Surprisingly, though (or perhaps not, given the looks of the thing) the "shadow" campaign continues on the company's website, where it features the woefully small and pitiful four-car lineup for the "major" automaker photographed in shadows, making the black cars look dark and mysterious, but also strangely LESS elegant - and one assumes that's what the photographer was going for.

Even more oddly, in the "gallery" section for the 200 on the company's site, most of the photos are again in shadow, or in extreme close-up. It's incredibly difficult to get a handle on what the car looks like, or any of them, for that matter.

Is this deliberate? I think so. The four cars Chrysler is putting on the market in 2011 run from just over $19,000 for the 200 to just over $30,000 for the Town and Country minivan (rated one of the worst cars on the market by Consumer Reports last year.) All of them are shown in deep shadow and in solid black.

From a styling point of view, these are among the worst cars Chrysler has ever produced. They are bland, lack imagination and vision, and do not excite in the least. The new headlights on the 300, for example, are meant to be more elegant than the 2005 300, which was a rare hit for the company. Why mess with good, unless you're going to make it better?

I have a few questions for Chrysler:
What happened to your Glory Days? Chrysler has put more concept cars on the road than any other car company. To name just three: the PT Cruiser, the Pacifica, and the aforementioned Crossfire (which, despite that unfortunate name, outsold the Audi TT for a brief while in the mid-2000s.)

Where is your Vision? The Crossfire was a beautifully executed vehicle that took chances. So did the PT Cruiser, which sold millions. What happened to your mojo? It's sure not in the 200.

Where is your electric car? Chrysler was working on a secret weapon, the daringly styled ecoVoyager (see drawing below) which would have theoretically gotten 300 miles for each charge of its lithium-ion batteries, or even run on hydrogen (though we were promised this with the Chevy Volt, too, but never mind.) This was in 2008, when it hit the auto show circuit. Flash ahead to 2011, and Nissan literally cannot produce enough of its plug-in electric Leaf vehicles, nor can Toyota create enough Prius's to meet demand. Chrysler could have been the talk of the industry with this vehicle. But Chrysler blew it. Again.

Chrysler Comes up Short with the 200

It was easy to suspect something was wrong when, in the much-hyped 2011 Super Bowl ad for the (supposedly) brand new Chrysler 200, the car itself isn't the star, but the gutted remains of Detroit, which used to make cars. Or to be generous, used to make more of them.

The car is only hinted at behind a lot of shadows and smoke, and there's a good reason for that. It's a dud. It is far from the "luxury car" pretensions promised both in its Auto Show days and in the ad.

Note the beautiful vehicle to the right, on the bottom. That's the gorgeously wrought, curvaceous 200 America was promised in 2009. The dud on the top is what we got - a Sebring with a new grille and hood treatment. In fact, the Sebring had an arguably more beautiful grille and the creased hood brought to mind the sexy, though short-lived, Chrysler Crossfire.

The 200, by contrast, is dull, and when you first see one in the daylight, you may laugh out loud, as I did, in utter amusement that THIS is the famed "luxury car" in the famous ad.

Admittedly, few production cars will ever meet the expectations the concept raised. Though one must give Chrysler/Dodge some credit on that front, since it has brought to production more concepts than any other car maker (think: Neon, PT Cruiser, Pacifica, etc.) and sometimes, as in those examples, they even come close or exceed the concept.

Which makes it even sadder when this same car company fails so completely to "wow" after putting together such a great concept.

(As a footnote: Does anyone doubt that Hyundai would be able to translate the car in the bottom picture to market AS IS? After all, they put out the more curvaceous, gorgeous, above-expectations 2011 Sonata.)