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"When times are tough, automakers tend to act like Presidents. They don't invade small, defenseless countries, but they have been known to pull an irrational stunt to divert attention away from bad news.\nMarket share is off? Let's buy an Italian company that rhymes with fettuccine. Quality is on the rocks? Time to revolutionize the sales chain with factory-owned dealerships. Shareholders in revolt? Please give a hand for our new platinum-plated supercar.\nThe Chrysler ME Four-Twelve, the mid-engine carbon-fiber queen of last year's auto-show circuit, was a diversion extraordinaire. DaimlerChrysler's management wants the plebeian Chrysler brand to ascend the market-crawl right up the pant leg of Lexus and find an artery. Difficult, especially when you're offering kickbacks to buyers to drive home Concordes and Pacificas.\nA desperate year ago, throwing a Hail Mary bomb at the $500,000 line seemed to Chrysler chief operating officer Wolfgang Bernhard like a good way to move the team forward. With four turbos, 12 cylinders, 850 horsepower, and about two inches separating butts from bitumen, the ME Four-Twelve was a school-boy doodle in 3-D meant to purge memories of chrome-festooned Fifth Avenues. If the predicted price of a half-mil didn't move Chrysler upscale, well, perhaps nothing would. That was then.\nNow, with Bernhard swept out of the company and the Chrysler 300 and Dodge Magnum hooking a U-ey on both the sales and self-assurance of the company, the pressure to do something silly is easing. Having gauged the line for $500,000 Chryslers to be remarkably short, the company is now considering more modest proposals for a flagship sportster.\n\n\n\n\n             \n0502_chrysler_unfinished_01.jpg \n\n\n\nAllow us to introduce you to the Chrysler Firepower!--that's what the company calls it, and the name includes that disturbing exclamation point--a shapely and eminently more rational concept crumpet that will be spinning before the flashbulbs of the 2005 North American International Auto Show in Detroit by the time you read this. Painted the color of arcing electricity, the two-seat concept's stretched skin hides mostly off-the-shelf parts, including a stock Dodge Viper chassis, a stock 425-hp, 6.1-liter Hemi from the new Chrysler 300C SRT-8 [see preview], and a stock DaimlerChrysler five-speed automatic built in Kokomo, Indiana. Even the tires--concept cars typically wear hand-cut treads mimicking cheetah paws or the like--are stock Michelin Pilot Sports direct from the Tire Rack. A dealer window sticker ending in a number between $50,000 and $60,000 wouldn't look terribly out of place.\n\n\n\n\n             \n0502_chrysler_unfinished_02.jpg \n\n\n\nOur first inspection of the Firepower! is accompanied not by flashbulbs but by the whiz of grinders and crackling of arc welders in the considerably less glitzy confines of the Metalcrafters workshop in Fountain Valley, California. Metalcrafters is the Pentagon basement of the auto industry, the place where designer sketches and million-megabyte computer models are milled, hammered, and vacuum-formed into auto-show stars. Everything except the tires, engine, and donor production parts is fabricated on site, including the carbon-fiber body panels, leather-trimmed interior pieces, aluminum wheels, and glass. Partitions divide the building into key-code locked cells--employees call them \"build bays\"--so visiting executives of one client can't peek at what competitors are creating.\n\n\n\n\n             \n0502_chrysler_front.jpg \n\n\n\nBring your American Express card. Engineer Nevill Ooms, Metalcrafters' engineering liaison with the car companies, says even a straightforward concept car such as the Firepower! takes more than 20,000 man-hours to build and costs somewhere between $1.2 million and $3.2 million, depending on the ratio of fabricated parts to production parts. Some of the line items: A paint job runs about $40,000, a single wheel machined from billet aluminum costs $6000. Head- and taillights are usually machined from solid chunks of aluminum and acrylic. Client diddling and last-minute changes--longtime customer Chrysler is one of the better ones at avoiding these, says Ooms--only drive up the price.\nOoms shows us to build bay No. 15, where the Firepower! rests on a piece of industrial carpet surrounded by air tools and workbenches. It looks like a shark swimming through a Sears Craftsman commercial. First impressions are the same as with a Viper: It's low and wide with some kind of serious motor shoving the cockpit to the back. Then you start noticing the details--the aluminum-trimmed hood strakes and fender vents, a strip of polished aluminum that runs along the rocker panels, jeweled LED headlamps, and a Chrysler cross-hatch grille flanked by spear-shaped LED driving lights.This isn't a blue-jean bad boy's toy like the Viper. It's dressed up, a tailored tuxedo accented by solid silver cufflinks and a TAG Heuer. In the rear, where twin tailpipes exit through a carbon-fiber diffuser and below a glass hatch, some influence from other fantasy rides creeps in. There's a taste of Aston Martin DB9 in the side-glass shape, slope of the roofline, and wraparound taillights. There's a hint of Bentley Continental--and, Chrysler would prefer us to point out, ME Four-Twelve--in the rear haunches with their double-radius wheel arches.Large doors spill back onto the fenders and down into the rocker panels. Release them Viper-style with a pushbutton electric solenoid. A heady, new-Ferrari smell of leather rushes out. Mmmm! No floating holograms or brushed koala pelts in this concept cockpit. It's all fairly normal, with a three-gauge binnacle under a creamy-leather hood and a center stack bracketed by leather-trimmed hand grips and painted in piano-black lacquer. The acres of buffed aluminum (even the column stalks are billet) are the only real bits of pure Hollywood onboard; those and the fake digital numbers in the center air ducts, a novel and fairly practical idea for displaying temperature settings.Sun rays splash in through a tinted glass roof, deeply inset between the roof arches to give passengers a few extra inches of precious headroom. If the Firepower! ever makes it to production, don't be surprised to see those arches rise to meet safety standards. Over-the-shoulder visibility around the expansive rear pillars may also improve--at least we hope.\n\n\n\n             \n0502_chrysler_interior.jpg \n\n\nIt's November back in wind-blown Detroit, where Thomas Tremont, vice-president of advance product design strategy, explains the game plan behind the Firepower!:\"This year we wanted to take the [sports car] theme and bring it down to earth a little bit. The question was, What can we do with a GT, and oh, by the way, what can we do with the Viper chassis and this motor?\"As with the ME Four-Twelve, only the broadest of outlines was handed to Chrysler's young team of future-product designers, who set upon their sketch pads with a fury. The drawings converged in a part of DaimlerChrysler's Auburn Hills headquarters that designers call \"Area 51\" after the government's super-secret Nevada test site. In the end it was Brian Nielander, head doodler on the ME Four-Twelve, who again produced the winning exterior concept.\"The idea is an Aston for the common man. Something that's a little more attainable,\" he says. Compared with the \"hard geometry\" of the ME Four-Twelve, \"this is a little more of a blend of the organic, a little more refined and subtle.\"Nielander claims he was less obsessed with the Aston Martin than with the Corvette, likely the car's closest competitor should it be approved. Hence, everything was kept realistic. Nielander even put a forward-swept cell-phone/GPS mast on the roof integrated with the government-mandated high-mounted stop light. Some of the aerodynamic work done on the ME Four-Twelve was put to use on the Firepower!--especially in the rear quarters, where sharp corners proved better for \"snapping the wind around.\"The interior hard points--the steering column, the seat mounts, the pedal placement, and the extra-wide center tunnel--are basically the same as the Viper's. True, the cockpit has \"a lot of bling,\" admits interior designer Greg Howell, \"but it's very feasible. Just look at the Audi TT and the Mini Cooper.\" Chrysler is itching to do something big. If they build it, the ME Four-Twelve could be huge--a huge mistake. The Firepower! shows what time out for a little rational thinking can produce. We are certainly distracted. \nVEHICLE TYPE: front-engine, rear-wheel-drive, 2-passenger, 3-door coupe\n\n\nESTIMATED BASE PRICE: $50,000\n\n\nENGINE TYPE: pushrod 16-valve V-8, iron block and aluminum heads, port fuel injection\nDisplacement: 370 cu in, 6059cc\nPower (SAE net): 425 bhp @ 6200 rpmTorque (SAE net): 420 lb-ft @ 4800 rpm\n\n\nTRANSMISSION: 5-speed automatic with manumatic shifting\n\n\nDIMENSIONS:\nWheelbase: 98.8 in Length: 172.6 in  Width: 73.2 in  Height: 47.7 inCurb weight: 3400 lb\n\n\nC/D-estimated performance:\nZero to 60 mph: 4.5 secStanding 1/4-mile: 12.8 sec @ 112 mph\n\n\nProjected fuel economy ( C/D est):\nEPA city driving: 14 mpgEPA highway driving: 19 mpg\n"
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