Chrysler’s Curve Master

The lad doodled. The lower eyelid of a headlamp. A fender. A door window. A trunk. And wheels. Sometimes a teardrop, a spacecraft. Cars. Even hiding out behind the back desk of the third row wasn’t enough to keep the Flint, Michigan, fourth-grader out of trouble, until an art teacher stopped by and became Tom Gale’s first serious customer.

Forty years later, the Michigan kid who liked to sketch concept cars on his Big Chief tablet suddenly finds himself the hottest automotive designer in America. As Chrysler’s design chief he has been a major force in one of the most remarkable product turnarounds in the industry’s history: a shift from what were considered some of the stodgiest cars of their era to some of the most curvaceous. His ascent began with two sports cars, the elegant, nimble and fast Dodge Stealth, and the implausibly overpowered V-10 road rocket known as the Viper, both of which bore the now unmistakable Galean lines. His masterwork came in the form of a mainstream product — the “LH” cars (Eagle Vision, Dodge Intrepid, Chrysler Concorde) that debuted late last year, all of which bear Chrysler’s distinctive “cab-forward” look.

Gale grew up in an era when the postwar group of industrial designers — men like GM’s legendary Harley Earl, whose decree of “longer, lower, wider” became the maxim of the industry — were captivating auto shows with cowls, tail fins and futuristic shapes that turned boxes on wheels into high-flying fashions of steel and chrome. But then Gale labored for almost 25 years in a company that was known mainly for a single product, the dull and dowdy economy K-cars. Although Chrysler’s minivan, introduced in the mid-1980s, was a godsend to Little League teams and den mothers across America, it would win no beauty prizes. Chrysler’s problem was a familiar one in the industry: slow death by committees that would end up voting on things like wheel covers. “Overmanaging details was just a way of life,” says Gale. “No one was willfully doing the wrong thing, but everyone was just saluting.”

Gale was one of the first talents to be liberated by Chrysler’s industrial revolution and the creation of independent platform teams. When he drew the assignment to create a new midsize car, he and chief engineer Francois Castaing physically began tearing down and breaking apart clay models, pulling out the wheels until they stood at the edge of the metal, stretching them to the very extremes front and back, pushing the windshield over the hood until it began to look like the front of a locomotive. The changes opened up the height, width and interior space in ways that had never been experienced in similar-size cars. The result was a design as instantly recognizable and distinctive as Harley Earl’s fins, one that almost overnight changed the rules in the other creative studios of Detroit. Who would ever have thought that Chrysler would be turning down a request from Bugatti to use its Viper headlamps?

What’s next on the grownup’s drawing board? Gale admits an aversion to ornamental trimmings like chrome, opera windows, whitewalls and wire wheel covers. “Personally,” he says,”I’d nuke veneer interiors.” But he confesses to finding some new inspiration in the pure American classics like the Cadillac touring cars of the 1930s. “I don’t want my drivers to be thought of as flashy, opulent and dumb,” he says, “but smart, bright and responsible.” What kind of a look might that be? “What else?” says Gale, maybe seriously, and smiles. “Maybe cab-backward.”