Ain’t this America
Big bad gangsta luxury car getting a little long in the tooth
Behold the quintessential American luxury car.
Big, ol’ V8 up front, power to the rear and enough sheet metal in between to build a cruise ship, Chrysler’s 300C is as American as apple pie and Republican filibusters. Throw a slew of pushrods into that big-inch overhead-valve V8, tie everything together with enough leather to clothe a three-piece sectional and you have a car even Ted Cruz (closet Canadian and an opponent to the bailouts that saved Chrysler, oops, Fiat Chrysler) can agree is ’Merican.
The only problem, of course, is the market for traditional American has all but disappeared. Mercedes, BMW and Audi have forced Chrysler, Cadillac and Lincoln to the sidelines in the luxury segment, AWD has become a must-have and turbocharging has displaced, er, displacement as the route to smooth, efficient power. The church of cubic inches has ever fewer followers and mandating that they also worship rear-wheel drive makes for a very small congregation indeed.
That’s not to say the 300 C — in its top-of-the-line Platinum guise, no less — is not without its attractions. You don’t, for instance, have to pledge allegiance to the American flag to revel in the new Chrysler’s interior. No longer does the 300’s interior resemble a slapped-together hodgepodge, a conglomeration of widely disparate themes seemingly thrown together willy-nilly in the hope that a comprehensive interior decor might emerge.
Fortunately, the 2015 version is one complete — and extremely attractive — package. Oh, all the touch points have remained largely the same — the 300’s 2015 rejig is more mid-model refresh than complete redesign — so the dashboard’s Uconnect screen could be bigger and closer to the driver for easier manipulation. But that is the interior’s only crime, the 300C’s cabin a masterful combination of the opulent and the subtle.
The Nappa leather — only the base Touring model gets mere cloth — is almost glovelike, the wood trim a subdued, but classy, matte finish and the plasticky chrome trim kept to an absolute minimum. But my favourite feature is the two-tone, coffee-and-cream leather-wrapped steering wheel. Pure class and a feature emblematic of the strides Chrysler has made in interior quality. Throw in details from the high-tech — such as Uconnect being one of the easier multimedia platforms to operate — to the traditional (there being enough room in the back seat for a football game) and the 300’s interior is definitely among Chrysler’s best feet forward.
The one oddity in Chrysler’s packaging system is that to get the best sound system — a 556-watt Beats affair with 10 speakers — one has to opt for the S package and its (as you’ll read) overly stiff suspension, Chrysler feeling that pounding bass and, well, a pounding ride share some sort of mutual kinship. Nonetheless, comparison to a Bentley Continental cabin, albeit a few notches downscale, would not be a gross exaggeration.
Less has been changed with the 300’s exterior. Again, this is a mid-model refresh; hard-engineered points must remain the same so the designers were limited to cosmetic flourishes, mostly in the form of new front and rear grille/fascias. For a certain clientele, the entire effect works, the 300 still having a loyal following. The problem, methinks, is that the 300 still looks like Al Capone or Scarface should be driving it.
Indeed, the blinged, dubbed and tinted-windshield 300 is pretty much a staple on South Beach’s Ocean Boulevard. Back in the day when Chrysler was looking for any kind of following, that bad-ass “street cred” might have offered a certain legitimacy. But with Fiddy almost a Rotarian now and Suge seemingly having busted a move too far, the whole “gangsta” thing is starting to look a little recycled. A little Jeb Bush, one might say.
The engine, likewise, may be old, but it’s still a good one. Chrysler’s current Hemi V8 may have nothing to do with the hemispherical combustion chamber that made the original 392 and 426 icons, but it still pumps out 363 horsepower and 394 poundfeet of torque from its 5.7-litres. Mate it to the slick-shifting eightspeed automatic transmission and you have a package that can accelerate the 1,962-kilogram sedan to 100 kilometres an hour in less than six seconds, all the while sipping fuel at an impressively frugal 9.3 L/100 km on the highway, thanks to the eightspeed’s overdrive top gear spinning the engine well below 2,000 rpm at 100 km/h. It even sounds the part. I may make fun of Yankee Doodle Dandy-ism, but the throaty growl of a big-block American V8 will always be symphonic.
Chrysler tries to render the 300C’s chassis equally sporty, the suspension suitably stiff and the tires appropriately meaty. It means that, tossed into a corner, the 300C remains impressively flat while generating more than median g-forces. The fly in the ointment is that 2015 sees a change to electric power steering and, combined with Chrysler’s natural predilection for overboosted steering, there’s very little feel emanating from the front tires. The suspension is willing but the communication is weak.
That said, the steering makes sense on the full-squishy V6 model, its softer suspension and heavier all-wheeldrive powertrain better suited to Chrysler’s steering calibration. A new S model, by the way, offers even firmer shocks than the C, a waste of damping without a change of steering calibration.
Indeed, as much as I love the 300C’s interior — seriously folks, Ford and GM, as well as a few German brands, would do well to start benchmarking the 300’s decor — I can’t help thinking that the lesser V6-powered version is its best. Chrysler Canada’s public relations manager, Bradley Horn, assures me that most, if not quite all, of the C’s interior goodness can be had in the V6. All-wheel drive makes that choice more practical and that odd disconnect between stiff suspension and soft steering lessens.
Whatever iteration you choose, however, this much is certain: One of Chrysler’s traditional weaknesses — interior design — has finally been addressed. And constant selfimprovement, as every GOP presidential candidate takes pains to reiterate, is the bedrock of any American success story.