My parents were in town over the weekend so we went to the Petersen Automotive Museum, which has currently has a few awesome new exhibits including a showcase of Los Angeles lowrider culture and a history of electric vehicles. The best exhibit features a number of 2000s concept vehicles, the standouts of which are the Cadillac Cien, Chrysler ME-412 and Ford GT90, but my favorite was this weird-ass Chrysler concept that was never shown to the public.
It’s called the Chrysler Lugano, and it was designed in 1996 as a fixed-roof sports car using the Plymouth Prowler platform. What you see here is just a clay model that was created at Chrysler’s Pacifica Advanced Design Studio in Irvine, California. The project never went past the design stage, so the Lugano was never shown to the public. That’s a shame, as I think the Lugano is pretty ugly in a funny way, but also I think it would have been really cool for Chrysler to build it.
Chrysler had a lot of fantastic sporty concept cars back in the 1990s, and pretty much none of them got built. There was the stunning 1993 Thunderbolt and the outrageous 1995 Atlantic, both with two doors, and the 1991 300 and 1998 Chronos, which were more like four-door coupes. It wasn’t until the Crossfire that Chrysler actually put a coupe concept into production, and somehow it was the strangest out of the bunch. Out of all of those the Lugano might have been the most likely to have a chance at success, a truly cab-rearward two-door rear-wheel-drive coupe that was designed a decade before the Dodge Challenger came back.
Designer Kevin Verduyn used the 1955 Mercedes-Benz 300 SLR Uhlenhaut Coupe as inspiration — the most expensive car ever sold at $143 million — and I can definitely see it. The Lugano has a grille nearly identical to the classic Panamericana grille of the original 300SL race cars, now used by the company’s AMG products, plus a pair of large side vents on the driver’s side that echo the ones on the Uhlenhaut Coupe. (The passenger side has a simpler single vent; this was likely the designers trying out a few different proposals in the clay stage.) It’s got pretty great proportions too, with a similar greenhouse and trunk shape to the SLR.
It’s the Lugano’s headlights that make it look especially goofy. I mean, they’re kinda nice on their own, with cool turn signals that sit like fins atop the front fenders. But combined with the bluff front end and big grille, the Lugano looks like a surprised frog, and the dash-to-axle ratio and small cabin remind me of the Ambiguously Gay Duo’s machine. Then the rear end, while pretty, is too generic and European.
Still, with the typical concept-to-production design refinements I think the Lugano could have ended up looking really good, and it would’ve been awesome to see Chrysler offer such a great performance vehicle type back then. Don’t get me wrong, I love the Plymouth Prowler, but it’s certainly not a car for everyone or every situation. And being saddled with a naturally aspirated V6 and four-speed automatic in a car like that would suck. The Lugano’s coupe bodystyle would make that powertrain more tolerable, but with its longer hood and quad exhaust tips, I bet Chrysler was picturing it would have a V8 instead, which would be even better.
Alas, the Crossfire remains the only Chrysler-branded coupe we’ve gotten in decades, unless you include the Sebrings. I’m still bitter that the Firepower never happened, especially because it was mere months away from a total production car green-light and reveal. Rumors have swirled around for a while that Chrysler might get a version of the next-gen Charger, maybe branded ‘Cuda, but I think it would be even better for Chrysler to do big cab-rearward electric coupe like the Lugano instead of sticking with the muscle car retro design theme. At this point, with the Pacifica being the only Chrysler left on sale, I’ll really take any new product that isn’t just another crossover.
The “Modern Concepts: Future Visions from the Recent Past” exhibit will be at the Petersen until July 2025, so you have until then to go see this thing. There’s also a bunch of hypercars on display, along with some incredible coachbuilt classics and jet-age concepts. If you’re in Los Angeles, it’s definitely worth the visit.
