Ah yes, braking. Carbon ceramic composite discs are, at 15 inches across, as big as most cars' wheels. The technology is borrowed from the SLR McLaren (remember, Mercedes and Chrysler are sister companies, hence the AMG engine). The retardation in this car is vicious, almost painful, hit-a-wall staggering. Believe me, with that gargantuan acceleration available, it's easy to get disoriented and arrive at a corner apparently way too fast. That's what I thought I'd done a couple of times. But no. Just stomp on the left pedal. It pulls up short and straight and true, the ABS modulating everything to save my silly skin. They've been tested at an eye-popping 2g deceleration.
Cornering? Yes there's plenty of that. Huge grip as you'd expect, no real roll, a quick turn-in. The body and rear wing produce about half a tonne of downforce at 180mph, and the ME has made 1.5g lateral in fast cornering tests. Mild understeer had been dialled in today, to save us hacks from spinning if braking into a bend. But there's work to do, I'd say. The steering has a very fast ratio but feels a bit dead, and that's not what you want at all. This is the kind of thing that needs experience and sympathy in what is basically a black art, and Chrysler hasn't yet proved it has that. So does a real-roads spring and damper set-up.
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| Sleek shape pins half a tonne of downforce at 180mph |
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But let's not pre-judge. To get a car to this stage in so short a time is a remarkable achievement, something that could only be done by a big car company with huge computer power - plus a small, mad-keen team of engineers working all hours of the day and night. See, the ME Four-Twelve was designed and engineered on computer for the Detroit Show in January. And at that show, though the car had never run, the company made performance claims that have been borne out in fact. It's a testament to the amazing predictive power of today's supercomputers in the car industry, and proof that even in everyday cars we all drive, that bandwidth can dramatically reduce development times and therefore costs.
There was a reason Chrysler decided to engineer the virtual car so thoroughly (it had done structural simulations, aerodynamics and cooling modelling, and crash tests too). The company's bosses had a hunch a few patriotic American buyers might one, and it would have been drastically expensive and probably impossible to engineer a real car to match fantasy designs and plucked-out-of-the-air performance targets. This car had to be feasible even while it was still entirely virtual.
