TLDR: Mercedes-Benz killed the Chrysler ME 4-12 thought motor vehicle off just prior to it achieved creation because their executives were pissy that simple American engineers could use Mercedes pieces to develop a far better supercar than Mercedes themselves could.
When Chrysler and Mercedes-Benz merged at the change of this century, the Germans required to see what the Us residents were being made of so they gave them open up entry to Mercedes’ means and a far more-or-fewer blank cheque to develop a supercar in a pretty constrained window of time.
Over the span of much less than a year, a team of just 11 individuals, who primarily comprised of the then-new SRT workforce, came up with the Chrysler ME Four-Twelve: a mid engine supercar manufactured of aluminum and carbon fiber using a greatly modified Mercedes V12 with 4 turbochargers. The issue manufactured 850 horsepower, weighed beneath 2900 kilos, applied a 7 speed DCT, would operate the 1/4 mile in 10.6 seconds at 136mph and had a leading velocity of 248mph. *In 2004.* At the time it would have been the speediest and most effective output auto ever, eclipsed by the Veyron soon immediately after.
“But, Cody,” I can listen to you expressing, “it was just a notion automobile, they could make regardless of what statements they desired, they weren’t heading to build it!” Ah, my minimal personalized strawman, that is not completely proper. This is where by the urban legend component starts. See, Mercedes basically meant for the ME 4-12 to go into manufacturing. They assumed it would be amusing to see the Individuals struggle through creating a suitable European design and style supercar, and weren’t expecting good issues. They allegedly instructed the SRT skunkworks staff to have a generation completely ready motor vehicle by mid 2004, it was to be symbolic of their merging and, as considerably as every person on the project was informed at the time, they were being doing work on something that they thought would be going into output.
The legend is that when Chrysler delivered the remaining, generation-all set prototype, it was so fantastic that it offended the Mercedes execs. From their perspective, they ended up a grasp artisan providing a toddler a set of lego blocks, leaving them by yourself for the afternoon then returning to come across a fantastic 1:1 recreation of Michelangelo’s David created solely of lego sitting down in their lobby. Not only was the ME 4-12 objectively greater than any car or truck Mercedes by themselves could push into production, it was quite potentially setting out to be a person of the greatest supercars of all time. They did not want the Individuals exhibiting them up, in particular employing Mercedes parts, so they finished up cancelling the job. The official explanations offered were more like “it was also expensive” but the urban legend is that Mercedes killed one of the biggest cars of all time while it was even now in the womb due to the fact their execs had been insecure about how very good it was.
This sounds like the sort of story that Chrysler engineers really want to be correct, moreso than the sort of story that is legitimate. If any individual knows the place to decide on up that Lego Statue of David package, however, enable me know.
Submitted by: Cody Stewart