Hasta La Ideas

America is back.

At this year’s North American International Auto Show, Ford and Chrysler stole the show with their exhibits and products. As they say in America, “Bigger is Better” and their exhibits were on-par with the Germans (the krauts always set the bar for exhibit design,) but much, much bigger. Besides exhibition design, both Ford and Chrysler are rolling out great new product after great new product. They both killed it; I can’t emphasize enough how well they showed.

With the exception of the vintage Corvette, the GM booth, on the other hand, wasn’t very interesting. I later realized that I didn’t take many shots of their exhibit — not to mention that there has been more than enough pictures of a hybrid disguising itself as an electric car. It has one-sixth the range of a 4-year-old Tesla Roadster and none of the beautiful proportions that made the 2007 concept car penned by Nigerian-born designer Jelani Aliyu so exciting.

Speaking of American car companies and Tesla, Tesla didn’t have a prototype Model S on the stand, but they did have an Alpha build body and powertrain in glorious raw aluminum und schteel exploded view. To fully appreciate how awesome the design engineering of this car is, watch the Vimeo films with Peter Rawlinson (formerly of Lotus and chief engineer of some of the best cars in the world) below.

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