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.
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