Longtime TTAC reader juris b writes:
What is it that differentiates good car companies from bad? Probably attitude. And by thy details [thou shalt] be known. Those tiny details and gaps slowly gather together and create financial holes. A gap here, a gap there, and soon we get a real Chrysler. Like the US economy. A trillion dollar debt here, a trillion there, and soon you lose real money. How much would it have hurt Chrysler if they spent five minutes more at their 95 Windows and at least tried not to forget to photoshop sideview mirrors on their 300 sedan for the proposed turnaround plan. They managed to insert them on interior pictures, but somehow neglected the exterior. Or do they plan to have rear-view cameras all around? Detailing gentleman! If you can’t manage a simple picture, how on earth will you manage real cars?
That is hilarious! so they finally quid making cars and focus on making pictures? Or did they jsut make a picture of a car that does not exist to justify getting more of my money?
Since they stopped making cars no one wants to buy, they now even stopped making complete pictures of cars no one wants to buy…
Chrysler without mirrors, at least one thing less to break…. or is it symbolic for them not looking into the rear view mirror since they focus on their bright future?
The car not having mirrors is one thing… However the overall terrible lazy powerpoint slide layout style, use of starbursts (!?!) and insinuation that they will be winning JD Powers awards, have great gas mileage, superior quality… plus…is that an Emmy I see?
In looking at this powerpoint mess, I’m also going to take a guess that the rescue plan committee didn’t think it would be prudent to involve Chrysler’s graphic designers because it is rather obvious that this was hastily done by someone with no graphic design education. So instead of utilizing your own best and brightest, someone made the decision that this mess ‘was good enough’. Nope.
Another defective Chrysler.
They forgot the “Rack and Peanut Steering” starburst.
That and the rendering is so perfect the paint almost looks like chrome. Not that it matters to Congress, but it sure would be nice to see some Chrysler 300 test mules on the street to prove its not vaporware.
Of course it’s vaporware. That is a Photochop and not a real car. I seriously doubt if there even are running prototypes. Think they are more on concept sketches right now. And I wonder how many hours they spent doing that thing, and how they thought?
“Listen, we need the old 300 greenhouse, they will never give us enough for a completely new body. Okey then, what’s next? New front? Shape it up a bit, make it more square. That’s it. Make it look like it’s carved out of wood. Or chrome? Chrome is good. Make it chrome. There you go. Done. Now, where’s my coffee?”
@stu sidoti
I hate to break it to you, but these presentations are meant for members of congress that don’t care about good design or bad. They were obviously not meant for public consumption, or they would have spent more time on them.
Heck, I couldn’t care less about what the presentation looks like; I only care what the details are.
No side mirrors on the car? Wow Chrysler.. just when I thought I couldn’t be more disappointed in you. Although I fail too, for not finding the design flaw despite knowing the picture for about two weeks now..
Even the shadow is fake – just compare to the car in the posting underneath.
You could use that glass for arc welding goggles.
They’re all government workers now at Chrysler. They don’t have to care any more. What’s that saying? “Good enough for government work”?
“Not meant for the public eye”? The public paid for it and since it looks like they only did it the night before the presentation, some of the first corporate welfare $$$$ must have been used to produce it.
Expensive peep show.
A nice looking car! Better looking than any GM or Ford sedan.
“A nice looking car! Better looking than any GM or Ford sedan.”
I’m sure GM and Ford have pictures of cars they don’t build as well, and they’re probably very pretty. Of course, Ford is already selling their new Fusion and the new Taurus is in production trim now. GM has the Lacrosse, which is pretty sharp, and a few others that are pretty nice-looking.
Chrysler has a poorly-drawn picture of a car they hope to release sometime in the next few years. Along with 24 other models…none of which we’ve seen even in mule form.
If I was the guy asking for billions of dollars, I would have put a little more effort into the request than a typical middle-school book report.
I don’t even know why anyone is complaining about this. I mean, look at it – this is clearly from the future. This car is “2010-2012 MY”, and the author of this compelling marketing presentation already knows that it will be “Most Awarded New Car” in all of Automotive History… yet it isn’t even 2010 yet!
And Consumer Reports (of the future) has already rated this sedan’s reliability as 40% better than industry average, which leads me to believe that Toyota and Honda will not be around in 2010. You know what to do folks – sell your stock in these worthless Japanese companies immediately.
And here you are talking about side mirrors. The whole freaking car looks like it’s made out of liquid metal. Even the windows are some shiny black alloy. I’m guessing that the only way to kill it is to drop it into molten steel.
i don’t mind the way it looks or the bad photoshopping or the starbursts…
however the next 300c will be the “most awarded new car in HISTORY”???
or 22% better fuel economy?
40% better build quality than the average?
how about 50% more tooth fairy?
35% moar win?
the 300c that’s based off a 1997 w210 Mercedes e320?
notice the absence of chryslser badges too? Is that to keep people from throwing government subsidized produce at your government subsidized car?
Or perhaps they’re going to save enough money to make this car awesome by re badging a Chinese knockoff.
It looks like a car dealer ad from the Sunday paper…
The ad just needs some lens flare. Everything will be fine.
Agreed, the lens flare filter will save Chrysler.
Here’s my impractical but simple solution…
1) Sell the truck and minivan platforms to Nissan/Renault. Threaten them with an invasion of France if they don’t comply.
2) Give the car platforms to Mitsubishi so they can become the all-time ‘fleet queen’ of the industry for decades to come.
3) Sell the Jeep brand and related SUV’s to… well… maybe the Chinese. Either that or let it be spun off and become it’s own company.
Maybe a Mazda/Jeep combination would work from a product mix perspective.
It goes without saying that all of these suggestions will require massive amounts of taxpayer largesse in order to work.
On second thought, maybe we should just liquidate them. The government is already buying enough ‘toxic assets’ without having to endure Chrysler’s waste.
the 300c that’s based off a 1997 w210 Mercedes e320?
Sigh…IT IS NOT!!! Never was.
That being said, the presentation is laughable. They didn’t quite get the text to fit entirely into the mustard coloured starburst. Basic, basic stuff.
I am going to follow Chrysler’s example and start writing my own copy:
– NickR declared handsomest man in Canada
– NickR among the country’s wealthiest men
– NickR wins UFC heavyweight championship
No rear mirrors is appropriate for a company that will learn nothing from the past.
The info visualization guru Edward Tufte once showed how the organizational failures at NASA that led to the Columbia explosion were embodied in a single Powerpoint slide. See Chrysler graphic above for evidence of Chrysler’s organizational health.
When I was a teen the local Dodge dealer put a new K-car in the mall for display. Upon closer inspection, it had one Aries and one Reliant tailight! Some things never change.
juris b, where you been? I miss your posts.
More Starburst!!
How’s this for attention to detail…
Chrysler’s Canada turnaround plan submitted friday to the Canadian government was IDENTICAL to the US proposal..what..they couldn’t be bothered to write a canadian plan?
Also, there was a multi-page Chrysler glossy insert for the Toronto (CIAS) autoshow in the paper promoting a broad array of electric vehicles “under development”. On the back page in tiny print, “These vehicles are not on display at the Toronto autoshow”. Way to go!
Quote Droid800: @stu sidoti “I hate to break it to you, but these presentations are meant for members of congress that don’t care about good design or bad. They were obviously not meant for public consumption, or they would have spent more time on them.
Heck, I couldn’t care less about what the presentation looks like; I only care what the details are.”
Hey Droid800, I hate to break it to you but I’m gonna guess that you’ve never participated in preparing an annual report for a large corporation?!? While this is not an annual report, it is nonetheless a report to ‘future investors’ so I feel strongly that it should be a compelling read and organized in a dynamic manner that holds the reader’s attention-thus they absolutely should be utilizing their best and brightest in their graphic design department to achieve this, not torture the readers with atrocious design.
For many Fortune 100 companies, the annual report is the single largest project their graphic design departments will be assigned each year and it is sweated and poured over by many levels within a company. From my experience, I have seen that senior management cares deeply about their annual report’s contents, design, layout,legibility, and overall sense of just what their report conveys…not just the numbers-companies spend MONTHS on these types of reports becuase it is usually their once-a-year report out. In this case, this report might just be Chrysler’s last, so you think they might put a little effort into it? …maybe even give a darn about how it looks? Most companies sweat these things, and like Robert’s words up top point out, they didn’t. They prepared a report that if I were a ‘future investor’ for, I would be insulted at the lack of effort-so should Congress, on many levels, not just design, but for gosh sakes TRY to put your best foot forward an showcase your abilities-all of your abilities.
I feel that is simply unacceptable to go to your ‘investors’ with anything less than your best numbers and your best-designed pitch. If you feel differently that’s fine, I respect that you may only care about ‘the numbers’ and at the heart of it all it IS all about the numbers, but since you’re already paying your graphic design department anyway, why not utilize them to create your best possible pitch?
@pb35:
Gotta laff. You just reminded of my father’s ’93 Concorde. His was probably one of the first of the much vaunted LH (Last Hope) cars to be made. He had a leather interior. Three of the door panels had leather inserts, one had cloth.
Somewhere I’m guessing there is a cloth Concorde with one leather door panel.
When the Jeep Commander came out a few years ago we ordered one at work for teardown and it came to us with different side moldings (mouldings??) and different fender flares from one side to the other…one side had the fake little allen bolts pretending to hold the fender flares on and one side did not…at least they were all the same color.
They’ve got a long way to get that vaunted “40% higher than industry average reliabilty”.…Ahem.
The other funny thing is if you compare the car to the background, the car’s hood height appears to be about 5 ft, the roof height 9 ft, and the overall length about 32 ft. 22% improvement in mileage in 6 ton car? I can’t wait.
Hey weight (pun intended), it’s the 6000 SUX!
I agree with stu sidoti–Think about what you’re communicating when you send out a report that could mean the survival of your company, and it’s spangled with mustard-colored starbursts and a car without sideview mirrors. I think incompetence, sleazy hucksterism and desperation.
If “the details” of the report are all your reader is interested in (and why wouldn’t they be?), then do he or she favor and give them the details without the distraction of mustard-colored starbursts.
While this slide does look ridiculous, rarely do fairly early car design sketches (CAD or paper) include side mirrors. It’s just one of those things.
This is what happens when you let executives (or rather, their secretaries) do their own design work.
I’ve seen a lot of PowerPoint presentations, good ones made by a crack team of graphic designer and vetted by corporate marketing, and bad ones made by rushed vice presidents who left things to the last minute, and facilitated the design by yelling at their admin assistants to add more clip art.
The really looks like the latter, and it says a lot about the level of talent that remains at Chrysler.
I think Chrysler purposely dumbed down the image. I think savvy PR insiders know the importance of looking poor when asking for a handout. Mission accomplished.
“I think Chrysler purposely dumbed down the image. I think savvy PR insiders know the importance of looking poor when asking for a handout. Mission accomplished.”
I’m inclined to agree. It looks like it was made on purpose. And I don’t know what’s worse. A company asking for money deliberately dumbing down content to look smart, or a company asking for money doing the report in a hurry because no talents where there, or a company asking for money talking down to stupid politicians because they consider them sheep anyway. The point is, someone made an effort to have it made this way. And it’s quite a cynical execution either way you look at it. Would You buy a car from these guys? Or are You going to get buttfucked?
Whenever a car or car company is dissed on this site, whether it be for its unreliability, ugliness, etc., SOMEONE usually defends it or is an insulted fan. However, I’ve noticed that nobody EVER defends Chrysler posts on this website. Probably because anyone who cares enough about cars to read an article before buying wouldn’t have a Chrysler in the first place.
First thing that goes in corporate America when a company is having problems is the marketing department… I’ve worked in two!
I don’t know whether the Congresscritters will read the PowerPoint or would know good design if it slapped them upside the head, but I do know this: When you’re asking for billions of dollars, you put forth a highly polished, well-thought-out PowerPoint, and you’d better be prepared to field questions about the hows and the whys.
So you take the 300 add side bumps and stick on an aspen grille. I’ve seen this before. It is from insurance companies that are promoting their product, without insulting any one car company by using an image of any real car.
golf4me :
February 22nd, 2009 at 11:13 am
More Starburst!!
More Cowbell!
peoplewatching04
There’s a few of us around. Even on Chrysler enthusiast websites we’ve been talking about how bad this presentation is.
That being said, a lot of us also do also not approve of the garbage that went on during the DaimlerChrysler era. The jury is still out on the current owners, but by the looks of this…
weird is how they didnt forget to add the mirrors on the Jeep Grand Cherokee sketch…