- Ralph Gilles says Chrysler interiors once lagged badly behind competitors’.
- Chrysler veteran claims 2008 Audi A4’s cabin inspired a total design rethink.
- Today’s Stellantis quality is better, with more emphasis on user experience.
Most automakers would rather pretend their old mistakes never happened. Stellantis’s chief doodler man Ralph Gilles isn’t one of them. The design boss recently looked back at Chrysler‘s pre-bankruptcy years and admitted the company’s interiors were nowhere near where they needed to be. In fact, Gilles, a 110 per cent car nut who joined Chrysler more than three decades ago, brutally described 2000s’ cabins as having “water-pistol grade” quality.
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Speaking during a tour of Stellantis’ North American headquarters, Gilles said he’d grown tired of cabins that felt cheap compared to the competition in the run up to the automaker’s 2009 bankruptcy. The breaking point came when he looked inside a rival product.
“Why does ours look like plastic and theirs look so good?” Gilles recalled asking himself, according to Auto News. “Audi came out with the A4, and that turned me upside down. I saw the Audi A4, that was it. I got pissed off.”
If you’ve ever sat in a mid-2000s Chrysler product and then climbed into an Audi from the same era, it’s easy to understand his frustration. But that frustration eventually turned into action, and a real shift in quality on vehicles like the 2009 Ram 1500. Gilles helped establish a dedicated interiors studio and challenged his young hires to make cabin quality a genuine strength rather than a weakness.
Learned From Past Design Crimes
Since then, Chrysler’s successor companies have earned far more praise for what buyers see and touch inside their vehicles. Just take a look inside a Jeep Wagoneer to see how far things have come. Maybe they’ve come too far, because ironically, Gilles says the challenge today isn’t making interiors better. It’s knowing when to stop.
“When we went crazy with interiors, sometimes we over spec’d the interiors a little bit because we were trying so hard to make a statement,” Gilles said. “We found that we were exceeding the competitive set.”
Make The Screen Better, Make The Driver Happier
But it’s not just plastic quality that matters these days. So does how a driver interacts with the car’s controls. Edmunds attended the same HQ tour and reports Gilles explaining that Stellantis had just four UX (user experience) designers after it was first formed by the merger of PSA and FCA. Now it counts more than 180 designers who work on crucial elements like the infotainment system.
What was the worst Chrysler cabin you ever experienced, and what made it so bad? I’ll kick it off with a nomination for the second-gen Sebring (below), a sub-Korean mess of rock hard, unremittingly grey (or beige) plastics and next to no design flair.
