From KCRW in Santa Monica, this is The Treatment.

Welcome to the treatment. I'm Elvis Mitchell. I'm in Detroit where I learned that if you're a young man in Montreal and your aunt sends a letter

to Lee Ayacocca saying that you have a gift for design, you do conclude to be Ralph Gilles,

who's now a VP of Design at Chrysler, but he comes out of Studio 3, the studio responsible

for an amazing array of cars. Ralph is probably best known to many of us, car lovers,

for his amazing work on the 300. A year ago in the show, David Cronenberg said it's a car with

movie star charisma. So my guest, Ralph, thanks so much you're doing the show.

Oh, you're more than welcome, Elvis. One of the great things about that 300 is that it brings

a real kind of like old

school glamour back to cars that had been missing for, I think, a while. Why do you think

that had sort of disappeared? I don't know why it disappeared. I mean, a lot of social things

happened. I mean, the 70s was probably the time a lot of design got muted and destroyed.

You remember the OPEC era. There's a lot of volatility and a lot of people

got conservative. And American car companies especially tried to become something they weren't. They

were trying to be European. They were trying to be, try to be small when they weren't quite

ready to be small yet. And Americans, you know, they've always liked style and still do. So

it's a bit of a rediscovery. When you talk about that, I just think about the TC by Maserati that kind of tried in the 80s,

which seemed like a car that was neither an European car nor an American car.

Quite a confused car.

And what ends up happening is you get these ideas, these marketing concepts,

but until you have the right platform, it's all for not.

And the reason I mentioned is that 300 is only what it is because it has the underpinnings

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