Picked up the Automobile magazine and they did a short little write-up on the Avenger basically saying they just about hate every design aspect of it
Just throught I'd toss that in here after reading it lol.
Manufactures have long made the habit of showing lightly disguised production cars as "concepts," but rarely have such a teaser been as completely depressing as the Dodge Avenger presented at Paris. Even if the show car's bad fits, poor paint, and seemingly careless assembly are not repeated on the production cars, it's bad enough that every design feature will be.
The hapless young designer who was sent to Paris to talk about it, Ryan Nagode, 25, has all the trendy designer jargon down pat - headlights are no just lamps, they're "round burners" - not much of what the had to say was pure PR BS. TO insist that the Avenger embodies "Dodge attitude," whatever that may be, and that the bland, banal, and exceedingly ordinary Avenger shape is defined by "powerful cues" is just plain silly. If the awkward rear fender indication starting on the rear door, Charger style, or the SUV-like extensions around the wheel openings are powerful cues, then tehre is little hope for Dodge in the future.
Leave the propaganda aside, and what you have is a chunky, even brutal shape that Chrysler seems to think says "American style" to Europeans, who are expected - by Dodge - to buy this car in large numbers. We doubt that. In Europe it can only be a marginal niche product, and the fact that it is a three-box shape in a market where hatchbacks are style of choice means that it faces an uphill struggle from the start.
The upper body structure profile is actually quite nice, although the side glass line is marred by a black-out panel at the rear point, but i is out of proportion with the rest of the car. The body sides are rather flat, with a big indent at the bottom of the doors intended to minimize their excessive height. Each corner of the car is a blocky volume, with the center of the front and rear bumpers inset, the result being that the car seems narrower than it s. Starting from scratch, they could have made this a good-looking car, buy they missed completely, giving us a hodgepodge of unresolved and unrrelated lines and surfaces.
