The Plymouth Prowler doesn’t have a sterling reputation in the automotive press. At the time of its 1997 debut, it was criticized for packing a 3.5-liter V-6 in a body that screamed for a V-8; today, its Syd Mead retrofuture styling has gone out of vogue. By the time it was discontinued in 2002, wearing a Chrysler badge after Plymouth’s demise, fewer than 12,000 Prowlers had been sold.
It may seem like the Prowler was a fluke, a strange side project that somehow made it past the accountants to share a showroom floor with Town & Country minivans and Ram pickups. But when the Prowler came up in conversation around office this week, we began to wonder: What made Chrysler pull the trigger on this particular project"
To find out, we spoke with Tom Gale, the former head of design at Chrysler who shepherded the Prowler into production. As it turns out, the car was far more than a 1990s spin on a 1933 Ford?it was Chrysler’s largest-ever experiment in building aluminum cars, coming nearly 20 years ahead of the aluminum car revolution we’re seeing today. “The whole thing really was an exercise in research for how to use aluminum materials,” Gale says of the Prowler. “At the time, Chrysler really didn’t have a lot of applied research. So in my view, this was a great way to kind of force us to take a look at aluminum stamping, aluminum forming, extrusions, welding, and combining that with composite materials.
“Prowler was...