Chrysler was once the king of crazy auto-show stunts

Stellantis’ decision not to attend auto shows in North America, including next month’s Chicago Auto Show, serves as a reminder of how many memorable moments the corporate parent of Dodge, Ram, and Jeep has provided at the once-premier North American International Auto Show, typically called the Detroit show. At its height, the show was arguably the most important one in the world, and it benefited from being the hometown production for Detroit’s Big Three.

Jason Vines, former global vice-president of communications for Stellantis precursor DaimlerChrysler, was the lead architect of several of the company’s top auto show stunts. Now a crisis public relations consultant and author (What Did Jesus Drive? Crisis PR in Cars, Computers and Christianity, available on Amazon), Vines wonders if auto shows will make a comeback.

Manufacturers “don’t like the show business aspect” of auto shows, Vines says. “I get that. So much of the business is online now. I get that, too: I’ve been shopping for cars for my wife and my daughter this last month. But unlike auto shows, online doesn’t let you sit in the car when you’re at home or in your office on your laptop.”

One of Vines’ most famous productions at the Detroit show was “the cattle drive,” where cowboys on horseback, paraded up Detroit’s Washington Boulevard in January of 2008, en route to Cobo Hall, the site of the show. Vines and his colleagues rounded up 120 longhorn cattle and had them shipped up from Oklahoma, where they surrounded several of the then-new 2009 Dodge Ram Crew Cab pickups.

Ford, that same day, introduced its restyled F-150 pickup at the show in a far more conventional setting. “The perennial number-one best-selling vehicle in America, and I know we got double, maybe triple the coverage for the Ram,” Vines recalls. That year, 2008, the Detroit show claimed to host 5500 media members from around the world.

Possibly the company’s best-known product reveal came in 1992, and was arguably the first of multiple major Chrysler auto show stunts. The attending media gathered near the north end of Cobo Hall and watched a brand-new Jeep Grand Cherokee slowly creep up the steps. Seconds later, it crashed through the plate glass window, and continued driving inside the building. Bob Lutz, then Chrysler’s vice-chairman, was at the wheel, and his passenger was Detroit Mayor Coleman Young.

The real glass had been replaced with movie-stunt glass, and the moment the Grand Cherokee reached it, a series of small explosives that had been planted around the window were triggered by remote, allowing the Jeep to enter amid thousands of “glass” shards.

“It was designed to be safe, and it was a brilliant demonstration of how you can use a low-cost PR stunt to far more effect at a product introduction than you could ever get from conventional advertising,” Lutz told the Detroit News in 2022. “That stunt was on every TV station, every major news media in the U.S.—and around the world.” According to the News, “There would actually be a sequel in 2006 when Jeep drove another new product—the ’07 Jeep Wrangler Rubicon—off its stand and through Cobo’s glass into the street.”

Some other memorable moments from the Stellantis crew:

In 1993, Dodge slowly dropped the new Ram truck from the Cobo ceiling onto the stage.

In 1994, “Chrysler holds the limelight for the third consecutive year,” said Automotive News. “Peter Graves, of TV’s Mission: Impossible helped Chrysler President Bob Lutz unveil its ‘cloud cars,’ the 1995 Dodge Stratus and Chrysler Cirrus, accompanied by showbiz theatrics. Wall Street is so impressed, it sends Chrysler’s stock soaring the same day.”

In 1995, Chrysler, Dodge, and Plymouth were introducing redesigned minivans, featuring sliding doors on both sides. As Lutz and Chrysler Chairman Bob Eaton sat on fake rocks, with Eaton wearing a Mister Rogers–style sweater, they read aloud from children’s storybooks as a red Dodge Caravan emerged from the right side of the stage, six feet above ground, driven by Kermit the Frog. It passed over Lutz and Eaton and settled into a patch of fake lily pads, splashing water onto the gathered media. The message: Chrysler was “leapfrogging” the competition.

In 2003, for reasons no one quite understood, the company developed an enormous, sinister-looking three-wheeled motorcycle called the Tomahawk, with a Dodge Viper’s V-10 engine. Riding it onto the stage: A leather-clad Wolfgang Bernhard, the company’s chief operating officer. In 2023 Stellantis recalled the Tomahawk as a “sleek, rolling sculpture that combined styling with extreme engineering.”

In 2006, the Chrysler Aspen, the brand’s first SUV, was introduced in an absolute blizzard of fake snow, as clowns from Slava’s Snowshow, a touring theater production described as “a universal and timeless theatrical poetic spectacle,” joined Chrysler executives on stage.

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