Chrysler Designers Are Finally Getting Serious About A Comeback

Chrysler may be letting current fans of the brand down with its 100th anniversary special edition that simply amounts to a window sticker on the back of a regular minivan, but it’s been promising that fresh products are looming on the horizon for years. Now, it sounds like the automaker may be getting serious about new models. Stellantis design boss Ralph Gilles, who is sort of famous for saving people’s lives with his Jeep Wrangler once, as well as for his iconic Stellantis vehicle designs over the years, has announced a suite of new teams for design, development, and marketing at Chrysler, which is a good sign of more to come.

It’s kind of surprising and alarming to hear what Chrysler must have been like under previous stewardship, as it clearly lacked the resources necessary for proper development of a full-scale automaker if it didn’t have teams already in place before now working on the design and engineering of its next-gen products. To be fair, the family of Stellantis brands have had a rough time so far introducing new vehicles and EVs like the Hurricane-engine-equipped next-gen Ram 1500 pickup or the fully-electric Dodge Charger Daytona, so maybe Chrysler was smart to rest on its laurels for a few years while the market found an equilibrium for new electrified models like BEVs and hybrids.

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“We’re Back On With Chrysler” Says Ralph Gilles

But all that is about to change, finally, for Chrysler. “I’ll put it very bluntly, we’re back on with Chrysler,” Gilles revealed in an interview with Road & Track. “We set up a [design] studio. We didn’t have a Chrysler studio, it was kind of coupled in with the Dodge studio, so we set up a separate Chrysler studio. The studio that we set up about a year and a half ago, we’ve been just going nuts in there, looking at concepts.” He went on to add, “The product planners have a team. There’s a marketing team now, so we’ve built all the fixings to really look after the brand, and that’s brought new energy I find, new questions, new demands from the brand heads.”

What To Expect From Future Chrysler Models

The chief designer also confirmed that the Halcyon concept won’t go into production in any form close to what we see of it today, but it should inspire and inform many aspects of the new models coming. The designer highlighted the concept’s glass roof, the hidden tech stack, an augmented reality head-up display, and active aerodynamics will all factor in to next-gen vehicles. He won’t go so far as to confirm any specific new models or forms, but does hint that lower-profile vehicles like sedans offer efficiency advantages, particularly for EVs, that Chrysler won’t ignore.

“There’s been some talk about lower vehicles because they’re more efficient,” Gilles started. “For battery-electric cars, they do a good job for vehicle demand energy, so that’s all I can say. We have a lot of different form factors we can look at,” Gilles promised.

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As of this week, Chrysler CEO Chris Fuell updated the timeline for Chrysler’s fresh product assault, claiming that a new crossover model is now slated to arrive sometime in 2027 with a possible 2026 debut, and that will be followed by a second mysterious model that was said to be more directly inspired by the Halcyon concept, so it could be a lower-profile model like a sedan or fastback. The 2027 crossover will now debut as a hybrid model, and it’s now unclear what Chrysler’s EV ambitions are, given the slowed growth in demand for those vehicles.

Source: Road & Track