What would Frankenstein drive?

I wondered the other day what new car comes closest in design and engineering that epitomizes the automotive equivalent of Frankenstein. A little of this and a little of that and don't forget to raid the parts bin... presto, a new car! I believe it has always been in the back of my mind that the Chrysler Sebring would walk away with top honors, although the new Honda Crosstour is a nearby second.

The Sebring has been roundly trashed by most car critics for embracing every styling cliche not only within the Chrysler genetic family, but also generically available on other contemporary cars that cued up for the latest trend in sheet metal bending (remember the "Bangle-Butt").

First up, the Sebring grafts the Crossfire hood onto a plain-jane 4-door sedan. If the Crossfire had been a reasonable sales success, than there might have been a compelling argument for following suit on this mid-size masterpiece of crap. As it turned out, the Chrysler 2-seater didn't light many fires and the Sebring is following in the same unfortunate footsteps.

A traditional Chrysler grill looking especially plain and uninspired with the ubiquitous teardrop headlamp design found on most every car coming from Asia these days is nothing but common boredom. Robbing the Saturn Ion graveyard for a roof (not to worry, Saturn couldn't sell them either and had plenty to loan Chrysler) was shear laziness.

Hey! Car stylists everywhere! Want to be on the cutting edge of avant car design? Simply add a sweep-spear line to the side bodywork that plunges into the front wheel arch. I mean, if it works for Cadillac, Mercedes, Mazda, et al, than it can work for you, too.

Enhance with a harsh, noisy ride and an interior full of hard plastic with ill-fitting materials and what do you get?

Tah-Dah! The Chrysler Sebring.



Ranked dead last in Consumer Reports compilation of 39 family sedans, this meager challenger in the critical mid-size segment has sold a whopping 34,700 units to date in 2009. Compare that with the 238,000 Camrys told by Toyota and you begin to see what sloppy engineering and deplorable design begets.

This is a godawful situation, and about as comfortable for Chrysler as Hugo Chavez at a Sarah Palin family picnic. How can you succeed as a car manufacturer when your entry in the largest sales segment is woefully inadequate?

All this boils down to one thing. Can Chrysler survive until a competent replacement arrives? Do they even have the talent to do better? We will see.

In the meantime, there aren't enough Frankenstein's shopping Chrysler's dealer lots, and that could spell a funeral pyre in the months ahead.

My Tabletop Solstice

This is my first attempt at adding video to my blog. Experimenting with my Flip vc, I am thinking of all the possibilities: car shows, my travails on the Eastern Shore looking for rusty classics hidden in a garage, on-site car wreaks... you get the idea.

I shot this one Sunday afternoon. Wish I still had the real thing.

Roadside Grub Horrors #4

Denny's Meat Lovers Scramble

Who among us isn't guilty of stumbling, half-drunk, into a Denny's at 3 a.m. and ordering a heaping plate of resentment and defeat? And that’s the key to consuming sodium and cholesterol in excess of 200% of daily values - doing so with dulled senses. It's best not to be fully alert the moment you've hit rock bottom.

Tastes like: The last truck-stop meal prior to an 18-wheeler jackknife collision.

Black Bess

It's called "creative destruction" for a reason. Capitalism's mechanism for sorting out the winners from the losers has always had a rough-edged demeanor and unintended consequences. With so much talk today about which car manufacturers will, or won't, survive the current economic crisis, it brings back memories of an earlier marque that played the wrong hand.

Packard's greatness was withering by the mid-50s. A post-war reshuffling of the automotive landscape left Packard, short of sales and cash, with a shotgun wedding to Studebaker. The prospects looked grim. And yet Jim Nance, Packard's president, was still pitching a brilliant future for the manufacturer to any banker that would listen. Nance's bet was a redesigned line in 1957 that would surpass Cadillac and Lincoln. But beautifully illustrated models in a paper portfolio wouldn't cut it. Nance needed a working demo to woo the investment firms. Hence, Black Bess.

Packard had few resources in those waning days other than the styling studio. There, a cadre of loyal designers - Dick Teague, among them - continued to work on what they hoped would be the new 57s. Based on the Predictor show car, Black Bess was the working mule for a reinvigorated luxury car that would save the company.

Time was not on their side. As finances dried up in the summer of 56, Packard employees were shifted to Studebaker's South Bend, Indiana, factory. It would be the end of the line for the Packard marque at East Grand.

But what of Black Bess? This icon of hope with it's strong vertical grill flanked by slim horizontal metalwork stood for nothing now but failure. It would have to go. Packard engineer Herb Misch, who had supervised the single running prototype, asked Teague to destroy it. None of the designers had the heart to do that, so it came to Red Lux, an old welder in the studio, to do the deed. By 4 pm that day, Black Bess was no more, as was Packard's future.

Black Bess. The beauty and sadness of creative destruction.

From Bailout to Divine Intervention

Wonderful News! I found grandmother's Faith Tones' album last week in the attic and just in a nick of time. I was getting a little jittery. I had seen where the Congressional Budget Office estimated that taxpayers would lose about $40 billion of the first $55 billion in aid to General Motors and Chrysler. I needed some reassurance from that lovely trio of beauties above that GM&C wouldn't do that.

Not if you know what a serious mess GM and Chrysler were in... and continue to be.

Let's take a realistic look at General Motors from an accounting standpoint (Chrysler was owned by private investment firm Cerberus and their numbers aren't available). I am not an accountant, but as a business man, I know something about profit and loss. Here's where it stands.

General Motors averaged a piddling profit of $1.5 billion each year from 2001 thru 2005 amounting to less than 1% of gross sales. And that's if the figures are accurate, as GM had to restate earnings for the prior 5 years after a Securities and Exchange Commission investigation in 2001.

In 2007, GM's gross sales declined to $180 billion and lost $43.3 billion ($38.3 billion was a one-time tax charge write-off).

In 2008, GM's gross sales again declined to $149 billion and lost $30.9 billion for the year with no tax write-offs. Effectively the worse 4-quarters in the 100-year history of the company.

In summation, GM's gross sales have steeply tanked for the past 10 years with a cumulative loss of over $80 billion. Market shared has collapsed as well.

So you tell me... a failing company that's made no money in a decade can pay off a tens of billions of dollars anytime soon?

I think it's going to take more than a dozen replays of the Faith Tones to make that happen.

Parts Sharing by Design

Like a lot of car buyers, I find the grill on the 2010 Fusion an attractive arrangement of the chrome 3-bar design Ford introduced on the "Interceptor" show car in 2007. That similar grill design has been the face of new Fords from the F-150s to the Flex ever since.



Originated by Peter Horbury, the 3-bar grill on the Interceptor was the talk of the Detroit auto show. Now, it appears other car makers have chosen to subjugate the design for themselves without any additional compensation to Mr. Horbury. Have you noticed yourself?



My first exhibit, and most blatant rip-off, is Lexus. Of course, Lexus' reputation for "borrowing" from other designers is now legendary. The very first Lexus LS that debuted in 1989 was a Mercedes clone from stem to stern. 20 years later, their M.O. hasn't changed. The 2010 HS Hybrid model's grill speaks for itself. Have these people no shame? Haven't they learned from history? Marilyn Monroe was the celebrated original, and maintains that status today. Her B-rated clone, Jane Mansfield, is the nobody no one remembers.



You would think one rip-off would be enough in the automotive design universe. But no, along comes Honda with their hideous "CrossTour" and presto, here's the Ford 3-bar grill again, albeit with blackened bars. Of course, Honda has demonstrated their engineering acumen since they arrived in the U.S. 50 years ago, but their design aesthetic is a language nobody speaks. Honda doesn't build beautiful cars today, and never has.

I know how it feels to have one's ideas or artwork appropriated by less creative individuals. But on the broad stage of automotive design, must Toyota and Honda be so fucking brazen about it?

While I think the buyers of the copycats may never conceptually put two and two together, if I were Peter Horbury, I'd be readying an invoice for the two imitators before they move on and cannibalize another competitor's design.

So...How's your day going? #3

Motorist Carol Dixon-Young nearly wreaked her Audi when a snake crawled up from under the hood on to her windshield while on her way to the supermarket. It then proceeded around the car towards the open window on the passenger side. Pulling into the grocery parking lot with the power windows now up, supermarket staff captured the 2-foot corn snake and released it into a nearby field. Said 27-year old Carol, "I panicked. I’m terrified of snakes.”

Sounds like a great story for a movie. I've thought of the title already.

"Snakes on a Pane"