In 1990, Chrysler boss Bob Lutz was looking at the same situation that had greeted Lee lacocca just over a decade earlier. Even before the global slow down kicked in, the company’s sales had started to slide, and at one point Chrysler shares were almost worthless. Again the management’s answer was, according to Lutz, “to launch new top quality products in as short a time as possible.” The race to get new cars to market centered around a $16 billion investment. To try to boost confidence, Chrysler showed a number of its up and coming new cars; including the Vision and the replacement for the long running Voyager as thinly disguised concept cars. But this didn’t help, with Chrysler losing another $800 million in 1991. Chrysler must have been very relieved to see the family car codenamed LH finally appears in showrooms in mid 1992. Badged Eagle Vision in the USA, it was a large and very distinctive saloon that simply had to reel in serious profits. The Vision cost some $1.5 billion to develop, took three and quarter years from a clean sheet, and had 700 engineers working on it. Cynics in the automobile industry claimed LH was short for “Last Hope”. The Vision featured the crab forward styling theme developed by design boss Tom Gale, which stretched the windscreen and its pillars much further forward from the driver. It was perhaps, one of the first modern US styling jobs to lead the rest of the world.
One of the key aspects of the Vision and other new generation road cars that helped to keep the Chrysler Corporation alive in the 1990s was not the raw sales figures it achieved but the sheer profit that Chrysler realized on each car sold. The company managed to keep its bottom line very low without compromising too massively on the engineering.
