Chrysler's Airflow electric crossover returned to the stage in New York Wednesday in a new exterior finish as Chrysler's development engineers creep closer and closer to their goal of taking the brand all-electric by 2028. The brand's first electric vehicle is due by 2025, and some variant of this definitely-not-a-revived-Celine-Dion-era-Pacifica-crossover thing is likely to be it. This version of the Airflow is dubbed "Graphite" and is the iteration Chrysler teased ahead of the show, but as we expected, not much of substance has really changed. Perhaps that's because this concept isn't yet particularly substantial. That's the beauty of an EV; once you have the basic design nailed down, the rest is really just an elaborate Lego project. Chrysler's builders are evidently still hard at work putting together a final product that lives up to the initial hype and range target of 400 miles on a charge. In the meantime, the design team has been tweaking the looks. As we saw in the teaser, the updated Airflow gets a new grille design with a thin light bar at the Airflow's nose and acute beneath flanking the headlights forming a symmetrical pair of lightning bolts (gee, d'ya suppose it's electric?) aimed at the car's nose. The lower fascia appears a bit more sharply defined too, but it could just be the lighting.
TranscriptZAC PALMER: I'm Zac Palmer with Autoblog. And this right here is the Chrysler Airflow concept. This is actually the second time we've seen it. Chrysler rolled it out at CES earlier this year. And now, they've brought it back to the New York Auto Show, but they've brought it back with a totally different appearance package.
So this car was initially revealed in a very stark white paint, but now it's obviously painted black. And they've also added a whole lot of bronze accents here. So I asked Chrysler, why did you do this twice? And, well, they redesigned this car for the New York market, for the New York show itself, just because they think that this sort of color scheme would appeal more to people living in the city, people living on the East Coast, as opposed to Vegas.
I really like a lot of the detailing going on here-- all of the bronze accents, the bronze and black wheels, the, well, modified Chrysler crest. You'll notice it's not the normal Chrysler logo on those wheels. And then around front is one of the small, real design changes with this car. They've added on the grille some lightning strikes to signify that it is electric. This was all just one straight piece before, but now you'll see little jagged lightning strikes and the new Chrysler logo up here. This is a full LED light bar when it is turned on. It looks pretty snazzy.
And how about we move along to the rear of the car here? You know, it's sort of one of those in-betweener cars, as far as the segment-- maybe looks a little like an IONIQ 5. It is crossover height, but it's not super large. But definitely pretty spacious.
So back here, you can see, well, its new name. It's called the Graphite-- what they've done to change this car. So Airflow Graphite. And you'll see some more bronze accents. A little more subtle down here-- just see it by the reflectors-- but they are indeed present. So how about we jump to the interior?
This is rather nice in here. This is a lot nicer than any Chrysler I've ever been in. You have screens galore-- a lower screen here for your climate control, a big one for your infotainment. Passenger has-- it looks like one, two screens. And then you have a large instrument cluster screen as well.
This steering wheel is very futuristic looking. It's flat bottom and flat top. And these controls here-- almost set in crystal glass, it looks like. Very, very neat look that is definitely different from most Chryslers you'd see today. In fact, it's nothing like them at all.
One other really nice touch that I'm enjoying is this crystal glass start-stop button. And it's apparently also the shifter, so that's how you put it into drive, reverse. Yeah. Really, really cool looking from in here. Very futuristic. I'm digging all of the sort of gray and bronze-ish accents in here. It sort of matches the exterior of the car.
And as I look into the back seat, there's a whole lot of space back there too. So all the packaging is really making a lot of sense. And those rear passengers have a whole lot of screen space too.
So that was the Airflow. There's no hard date for this specific car to go into production. However, Chrysler has promised an electric car by 2025. You know, it'll probably be based on this. It may not look exactly like this. But this is a really cool idea for us to start thinking about a more modern, revolutionized Chrysler.
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