Click image for a photo gallery of the Geely CE concept
Via Autoblog Chinese, the parade of Beijing-bound debuts continues. Today we’ve got another one from Geely, which seems to be working to establish itself as a style leader in a sea of Chinese cars, the looks of which range from the vanilla to the bizarre. The renderings you see here show the Geely CE concept, a compact 5-door hatch that easily has the looks to appeal to shoppers outside of Geely’s home market. If Geeley is able to bring this car to production and make it safe enough to meet Western crash test standards (something we have yet to see on anything remotely resembling a consistent basis from the Chinese manufacturers), it is going to make a lot of noise, particularly in Europe where a low-priced, stylish, compact hatch like this would sell like french fries at McDonalds. From what we’ve seen so far, Geely’s 18-car Beijing parade is setting itself up to be a stylistic quantum leap over some of its ridiculous past concepts and mundane current offerings.
Featured Gallery
1974 Ford Mustang II
The Pinto-based Mustang II nearly killed the Mustang franchise. Its sole claim to fame being a bit of product placement on the original”Charlie’s Angels” series. Plain chick Sabrina drove the notchback Ghia model, smoking hot Kelly (played by Farrah Fawcett) naturally got the Cobra. But the joke was on her–its smogged choked V8 put out about 140 hp. In a rare moment of understatement, Road & Track simply called it “neither fast, nor particularly good handling.”
1977 Ferrari 308 GTB
Even Ferraris weren’t immune to the emasculation that was the norm in the malaise era. The ’77 308 may have looked great, but drive one today, and you’ll live in fear of meeting a Nissan Versa at the next stop light. Naught to sixty time for the ’77 308 was an excruciatingly slow 9.4 seconds.
1977 Chevrolet Camaro Z/28
The Z/28 was the performance version of the Camaro and, less than ten years prior, it had been tearing up road courses in the SCCA Trans Am race series where other drivers lived in fear of driver Mark Donohue. The Malaise Era version of the car that used to sport in the vicinity of 300 hp? Just 185 hp and a 0-60 time of around eight seconds. That’s fully-laden VW Routan performance today.
1978 Ford Fairmont
About the only good that can be said about the Fairmont/Zephyr twins is the fact that the platform (“Fox” in Fordese) became the basis for the Mustang that would lead us back down the path of righteousness in 1985. Otherwise, the Fairmont and the Zephyr were abysmally put together, looked like the box they came in, were barely able to break 16 seconds in the 0-60 sprint and 100 mph was out of the question. All for an unimpressive 22 mpg in return.
1978 Peugeot 504 Diesel
The fact that the American public would entertain a car that took almost 23 seconds to complete the quarter mile and topped out at 86 mph illustrates just how bad things got in the Malaise Era. Although uncharacteristically for a Malaise Era car (and a French one to boot), it was reasonably well screwed together, but the fact that they seemed unkillable simply added insult to injury. 250,000 miles in a 504 diesel must have seemed like a life sentence.
[Source: Autoblog Chinese]