The reality: it ended up being a much-panned and oft-overlooked tablet.
The lesson here is that good marketing is to be expected, but calling out your competitors means that you’re really bringing it.
Enter the Chrysler 200. The now-famous Super Bowl commercial from Chrysler featuring Eminem and scenes of Detroit replays on TV repeatedly. As a Detroit native, for the first few weeks after the Super Bowl debut, my friends and I forwarded the video around, as it became something of the viral hit for Chrysler. I thought that it was cool, gritty, and pretty accurate for us that still love Detroit.
But when you call out other automakers and point out that this car is “luxury” from the USA, you better bring your big guns. That means it better be damn good. And this is the point where things start falling apart for the Chrysler 200.
Buy what you sell
In sales, there’s a phrase “buy what you sell.” It means that you have to believe so much in the products you offer to customers that you happily use it to. I’m sure Steve Jobs uses an iPhone. I’m sure Elon Musk drives a Tesla. What I’m pretty sure is that Eminem doesn’t drive a Chrysler 200, and now I’m pretty sure anyone that likes true imported luxury cars is not putting the Chrysler 200 on their shortlist.
It’s not that the 200 is a bad car, nor is the Motorola XOOM really a bad tablet. It’s really that the 200 looks and feels like an evolution of the Sebring, which is something that Chrysler was trying to avoid (hence the name change). The Sebring wasn’t a bad car in my opinion, but it never claimed to be a BMW 330. It found its niche as a sharp but forgettable family sedan or as a rental-car workhorse. And that was fine.
The problem is that when you simply change the sheetmetal and christen it the savior of the American auto industry, you’ve made more outlandish promises than Obama did in 2008.
Now, I finally got my hands on a 200, and across the board, it’s better than the Sebring it replaces in about every way. The interior upgrades are the most notable, getting the standard Chrysler corporate upgrade that the Journey, Grand Cherokee, and 300 got with a much more polished (if not slightly generic) dashboard. The outside is a bit more mundane. The front end is good with better headlight proportions instead of the bulbous Sebring headlights that looked like a garage-built graft from a BMW 5-series. And the overall sculpting of the metal looks more solid than the art deco treatment on the Sebring.
Unfortunately, everything from the A-pillar back looks almost indistinguishable from the previous generation. In my opinion, the 200 (and the Sebring) suffers from an unfortunate design decision to give the front end a long (almost dramatic) hood and an unimpressively stubby trunk. The greenhouse sweeps to the midline on the trunk and looks more like a fastback or the similarly offensive Porsche Panamera. For me, this is the first major missed opportunity on this redesign. Chrysler could’ve keep the same wheelbase and extended the trunk further out back. They could have disguised the length of the cabin with a more abrupt end to the rear window and the whole package would’ve telegraphed a much larger car, with much more dramatic sweeping lines, and a stance that looked more like it’s leaning into the wind. However, on the redesign, even the taillights are only modestly changed, and so simply from a styling standpoint, the 200 is a letdown because you have this eerie sense of deja vu.
A better car for the “imported from Detroit” commercial would’ve been the 300. At least there’s a chance that I would buy that car. But then again, it's not made in Detroit.
More 300, please
The second missed opportunity is to take the 200 into the style school of theChrysler 300. The 300 found huge success in its boxy, brash, unapologetic, flying-fist style. For me, the reason that this worked is that the 300 looked intimidating. The 200 went the sleek route and looks emaciated. For me, the original Cadillac CTS looked like the younger brother of the Chrysler 300 with its full box design and upright front end. And from a sales perspective, I think Cadillac proved that consumers agreed.
Now, taking a drive in the 200 is where I really started to doubt the renaissance of Detroit and wondered if the Big Three might simply be up to their old tricks of playing it two steps behind the foreign companies and hoping that your sense of newfound patriotism would help overlook the aforementioned shortcomings. Once you get onto the city roads, you’ll find that the ride is fine, but it’s neither sporting nor luxurious. The road and suspension noise seemed worse than in other cars in this class like the Civic. And let’s not forget about that engine. You could be forgiven for not knowing how many cylinders it has because you really can’t tell. If it’s a V-6, it’s feels like it’s a generation old. If it’s a four-cylinder, it’s pretty average. In my opinion, get the smaller engine. It’s going to perform much the same way (underwhelming) regardless of which engine option you select on the order form.
There’s just something all around about this car that feels a bit flimsier or “thinner” than other cars in this class. If Chrysler had simply updated the Sebring and threw it out there quietly like it did with similar upgrades in the Dodge Journey, the press on it would be fair and mostly flattering with headlines like “Sebring Injected with a Dose of Luxury” or “Sebring Steps Up from Rental Car Quality.” But the fundamental problem for me is that the hype around this car promised that you could stop looking at imports and that a badass with unlimited money like Eminem is willing to drive it. But neither of those claims are even close to reality. And the latest improvements to the 200 over the Sebring are simply overdue and basically just keep the 200 relevant in today’s market. In the end, I can’t see the 200 doing much better in sales than the Sebring did. Upgrades are nice, but the other car companies didn’t sit idly by either.
My advice to Chrysler is that we know that big changes are needed in Detroit both within the city and the auto industry, but that means you really need a flagship or halo car that we would aspire to own and puts all other cars on notice. Most of the Detroit-owned luxury brands are gone which makes this a difficult exercise. Cadillac hangs in there with competitive cars that people do aspire to drive like the Escalade, but Chrysler doesn’t have a car that can claim that kind of respect yet.
Past concept cars like the Chronos or the Firepower would have been worthy of a slogan like “imported from Detroit.” Kicking off that campaign with a car like the Chrysler 200 means that “imported from Detroit” could end up being a warning for buyers instead of a rallying cry.
The Chrysler 200 is the Motorola XOOM of Cars
