Speaking to an audience at the 2012 Management Briefing Seminars in Michigan on Wednesday, Chrysler Group’s head of interior design Klaus Busse said that the company’s bankruptcy played a positive role in improving the brand’s interiors, which for the most part, were universally panned during the Daimler era.
According to Autonews, Busse, a German ex-pat who remained with Chrysler when Mercedes-Benz’s parent company Daimler jumped boat in 2007, said that after the company re-emerged from bankruptcy in 2009, the remaining employees had sense of shared purpose, as well as a bigger budget and an artistic freedom.
Busse reportedly recalled how Chrysler Group models’ interiors were compared at the time with “the cheap plastic of a Chinese water pistol”.
The Chrysler executive added that the company’s new vehicles such as the 2013 Dodge Dart compact sedan now have interiors with “soul”.
As an example, Buse gave the old audio systems: “We used to be given a brick and told to design around it. Now the designers, the engineers, the suppliers are all in the same room working together.”
PHOTO GALLERY
