All photos courtesy of Cristian Farcas
When
Chrysler Group LLC employee Cristian Farcas set out in March on a
2,400-mile road trip to visit family and friends in New York state and
Washington D.C., and to attend a work event in Kentucky, it wasn’t the
distance that made the trip significant, it was the vehicle. His All-New 2015 Chrysler 200
was among the first to roll off the line in Sterling Heights, Michigan,
and this trip, at least in part, was intended to gather “fast
feedback,” information that could help designers and engineers back at
Chrysler HQ fine-tune the All-New 2015 Chrysler 200 before its launch to
the general public in the second quarter.
Compounding the significance of the trip
was the fact that Cristian had personally played a part in the
vehicle’s development. A senior designer in the Interiors Group at
Chrysler, Cristian worked side by side with the many talented people who
helped take the All-New 2015 Chrysler 200 from a concept on the
drafting board to a reality on the road.
With
that kind of personal investment, it’s not hard to understand why this
experience — and this car especially — would be so important to
Cristian. In his own words, “The road trip was a culmination of personal
and career goals coming together. It was my dream as a child to one day
design cars. By helping design the interior of the All-New 2015
Chrysler 200, I was fortunate enough to fulfill that goal.”
Of course, any goal is hard to
accomplish without help, and even though Cristian traveled alone, he
often felt the whole team was along for the ride. “Every time someone
admired or complimented the car, I remembered how hard everybody worked
on it back in Michigan.” That was true at the Canadian border, where the
border guards let him pose the car near the Canada sign, and true in
Washington, D.C., where in heavy traffic one morning, a commuter in an
imported luxury sedan shouted, “Hey, that’s the new 200. Awesome!”
Awesome
indeed. The exact car Cristian drove from Detroit, through Canada and
New York, to Washington, D.C., Louisville and back was an All-New 2015
Chrysler 200C with a 3.6-liter Pentastar® V-6 engine. The car is
Cristian’s own and, like any owner can
(not just Chrysler designers), he configured it the way he wanted,
opting for the available panoramic sunroof and an all-black interior
featuring real bronze-colored maple wood and complemented by warm bronze
accents and seat piping.
Cristian is especially happy with his
car’s center console, calling it his favorite interior feature “by far.”
What’s so great about it? “It’s highly adaptable your needs,” Cristian
says. “It features class-leading storage space, but it is also well
compartmentalized to help separate your items. There are also a number
of small, convenient innovations, like a cord-management opening. It
just makes sense.” Spoken like a true designer.
As for the exterior, Cristian is a fan
of the front and rear LED lighting. “It definitely stands out,” he says.
“It announces a vehicle that looks like it belongs in a more premium
segment.”
Attractive
exterior lighting isn’t the only category in which this car punches
above its weight. With more advanced standard and available safety and
security features than any other vehicle in its class*, the All-New 2015
Chrysler 200 offers an experience unmatched by the competition. “I am
absolutely addicted to the Adaptive Cruise Control,” Cristian said,
listing off a few more of his favorite features. “The Lane Departure
Warning with Lane Keep Assist are equally impressive.”
Innovative features aside, the true trip
highlights for Cristian were far less technical — watching the sun set
over Manhattan, for instance, and stopping in Washington, D.C., to take
photos outside the White House, Capitol building and Washington
Monument. He also reveled in the opportunity to share his car with the
good friends in New York and Washington, D.C., he visited along the way.
Most memorable for Cristian, it seems,
was having the chance to stop in Binghamton, New York, the town where
his mother lives, to show her in person the car he’d been working on so
intensely all this time. “Being able to share my work with my mother was
by far the highlight of this trip. It was like bringing something
full-circle, all the support she gave me as a young artist and aspiring
designer.”
To think of it in these terms — that the
All-New 2015 Chrysler 200 is a collection of stories like Cristian’s as
much as it is a ground-breaking vehicle — one begins to see how the car
truly is America’s Import.
See below for more photos from Cristian’s road trip.
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