There’s many a slip twixt the cup and the lip. Detroit has traditionally dangled tantalizing show cars in front of the public, only to deliver watered-down versions to showrooms. But Chrysler, in its renaissance of the ‘90s, rewrote the rulebook, delivering some production cars almost unchanged from the prototypes, including the Prowler and the Viper. The Chrysler Crossfire—first shown at the Detroit auto show in 2001—is as faithful a translation from concept to production as any in recent memory. The design concept was the work of 25- year-old Eric Stoddard, a wunderkind who has since been hired away by Hyundai.
Conceived as Chrysler’s answer to Audi’s TT, any production Crossfire couldn’t be some hyper-expensive, hand- built boutique car. (f Chrysler were to build it, an existing platform would have to be found in- house. And since the Crossfire would be a roughly $35,000 performance coupe, putting it on a Neon or Stratus platform would never do. Fortunately, when Chrysler looked at what was going down the assembly line of its sister company, it discovered that the Mercedes SLK roadster was exactly the right size and configuration to fit under the Crossfire. Bingo: a green light for production. But wait. A show car is made without any necessity to meet myriad real-world requirements. You just go with the flow, letting the purity of the original conception dominate.
