Inhabitat

See, I don’t get this.

A range of 200 miles is fantastic.

But since when was it vital that environmentally concerned people be able to accelerate from 0-60mph in 5 seconds?

Why would they need to travel at 120mph – that’s 45-55mph over the speed limit!

If this is a truly green vehicle then why has so much been spent on research to make it travel as speeds you can’t use and acceleration you’ll never need? Why has that expensive and wasteful technology then been realised and incorporated in the car, pushing up it’s purchase price and wasting resources in producing features you’ll never use?

This isn’t a green option, it’s a joke. A pretty joke, yes, with some formidable performance statistics, but a joke nonetheless!

Sorry Chrysler, but this is an excellent example of green design gone bad.

Steve N. Lee
author of eco-blog http://www.lionsledbysheep.com
and suspense thriller ‘What if…?’

3304hi is spot on. The only body modification Chrysler made to the Lotus Europa was slap on a dodge emblem in the place of the Lotus badge. At least Tesla changed some body panels on their Lotus based product!

Now Chrysler will use this car to try to convince leaders in Washington DC to help them keep afloat. Nothing more than an elaborate branding effort.

Great effort Chrysler rather than TESLA it is about keeping the price down.Platform sharing is the best way.that is why chrysler will out sell tesla there is a big diffrence between 100 cars a year and 50,000 cars a year.Its about appealing to the market as a whole not just three people who do not have a clue or just dont get the auto industry .

I’m not impressed at all, it’s ridiculous. This is simply the same old expensive high performance gas-guzzler design with a snap-in electric conversion. Any 15 year old kid could have come up with this concept. They need to completely abandon and erase the old ‘has been’ high performance/luxury car gas-guzzler image and mind-set and start completely from scratch to properly design electric vehicles of any type.
But, is this even possible given the existing automobile manufacturing infrastructure? That’s a big question and I think the answer will prove to be “No”.

This reminds me of a previous automotive industry failure- the conversion of gasoline engines into diesel engines in the 1970’s

In the 1800s this would be like designing an airplane using the body of a stage coach – just add a motor and wings and call it an airplane. Apparently they are stuck in the old high-performance or luxury car gas-guzzler mind-set and I think the whole automobile manufacturing infrastructure is stuck there as well.

Do they presume that a majority of the American public are stupid enough to think that a snap-in electric power conversion is innovation? Are they are too cheap to pay good engineers to design anything more than magazine propaganda suitable for 15 year old kids? Or, is the existing auto manufacturing infrastructure obsolete and on it’s way to extinction?

I think that the problem is not convincing the general public but rather one problem is the age old gas-guzzler mind-set of the manufacturer’s executives and design engineers. Perhaps they should offer early retirements or other incentives/methods to clean house and get some young and brilliant minds in there to re-shape the industry but is that even possible?.

The other problem may be that the whole American automotive manufacturing infrastructure is obsolete and doomed to failure anyway. It happened with the US steel industry which collapsed after corporate executives/boards of directors chose short term profits over long term sustainability and elected not to spend the money to convert to the much more efficient air-reduction process for making steel.
Numerous other countries built air-reduction steel mills and as a result the whole US steel industry became inferior and collapsed.

Hmmm. The death of the existing American automotive manufacturing industry is probably inevitable and probably a very good thing, opening the marketplace for new companies and an entirely new automobile manufacturing infrastructure with new technologies, new materials, new manufacturing methods, etc. However, I personally think that for many reasons the USA cannot be competitive in this arena and the best products will be made outside of the USA.

Another bigger and more important problem is that after nearly a century of the gas guzzling mentality there is a huge lack of sufficient mass transit systems. Designing electric sports cars is frivolous in view of that problem. The USA serves a good lesson for developing countries on what not to do.