I went back to the show on Tuesday morning, for its third and final day of press events, and on my way to see the Dodge Caliber
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| The Imperial's boat tail rear end styling is at least unique. (Photo: DaimlerChrysler Canada) |
and Chrysler Aspen introductions (the latter featured in a recent new vehicle preview), I stood and watched the Imperial slowly circle on its raised turntable, a beautiful blue glass backdrop mirroring its opposing image as it turned. I thought back to when Rolls-Royce unveiled the new Phantom luxury sedan (or should I say saloon), which, as I remember, featured an almost identical paint scheme to the Imperial concept. It was a time when I chose to pull myself out of myself, or in other words, I made my best attempt of playing army boot camp on my brain, by throwing out preconceived ideas of automotive design, concepts that I had allowed to become the benchmarks of what I then, and in most cases still do consider to be the ultimate expressions of automotive art, and create a clean canvas for Adrian von Hooydonk's Panzer-collides-with-Silver-Cloud Phantom. It didn't work, although I have to admit to being more accepting of the garishly overdone Rolls since its January, 2003 introduction, just like I have with others.
So I stood, chin cupped in my palm meditating on the massive machine circling in front of me, trying to break out of the confining gray concrete walls of my incarcerated mind and tap into some conduit of higher intelligence, a muse possibly, that caused principal exterior designer Mike Nicholas to dream up the concept's many unorthodox twists and turns in the first place. Yes, a muse, to transport me back to the time and place when and where his "inspiration" came, so that I could feel the textures he was touching, see the sights his eyes were capturing, take in the sounds he was hearing, inhale the odors he was smelling, savour flavours he may have been tasting, and most critically, that I might be able to truly ingest all the thoughts he was thinking when under such an influence, or perhaps, on the contrary, when compelled by the darkness of a hedonistically perverse adversary. There I stood, as if I was some anal retentive Harris tweed-frocked pipe smoking traditionalist art critic who, while normally finding something like Pablo Picasso's "Femme en pleurs" too offensive to be considered art, Jean-Michel Basquiat an utter abomination and Warhol, well, a mere populist silk-screener, trying to open up
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| The Imperial's massive suicide doors and elongated aluminum door handles butting up against one another at centre is a design element bordering on plagiarism when compared to the Rolls-Royce Phantom. (Photo: DaimlerChrysler Canada) |
to new possibilities, pushing myself beyond self-constructed limitations in order to contemplate what Nicholas might have been feeling as his pencil met paper and the first sketches of the Imperial Concept were realized, but then, one rotation after another, I kept getting stymied when the car's front-to-rear-view A- to C-pillar angle reappeared, exposing panels that looked so much like the aforementioned von Hooydonk-penned Rolls-Royce Phantom, with its massive suicide doors and elongated aluminum door handles butting up against one another at centre, a design element bordering on plagiarism, that I'd lose the muse and go back to wrinkling my brow and wishing Chrysler had just commissioned ASC to rework its 300C-based Helios prototype and clip on a half dozen Imperial badges.
But still, this regressive process may have worked a little bit. I walked away, glancing back every twenty feet or so, realizing that I now didn't hate it as much on this third day as I did on the first. And now, while stretching out in business class after a rather tasty dish of oriental beef on rice, patiently awaiting my gelato ice cream and warmed chocolate chip cookies that I can smell wafting throughout the cabin, and trying to clear my mind of the many new model launches and concept unveilings witnessed over the last three days so that I can concentrate on the Imperial press kit in my hands, I find myself abhorring it less than I did initially. So, I suppose there's hope for Nicholas' Imperial Concept after all, at least with me, but then again, the entire previous paragraph was purposely created as a type and shadow of what I think of the car - a grotesquely overachieving, overcomplicated, overbearing, and just plain overcooked example of automotive excess.
