"Some companies make pushmobiles that go nowhere, but our show cars have a requirement that they be able to do 100mph. And instead of a piece of foam sculpture that does nothing, our Airflite is a piece of art that four people can use and have a good time doing it."

Greg Howell, who headed the exterior design team for the Chrysler Airflite that was the company's star concept at the 2003 Geneva Motor Show, is clearly proud of the result.

And though styled like a coupe, the car is a full four-seater, with an undoubted presence from the decidedly 'in your face' front right along the long, tapered roof line, and the uninterrupted glass and body sides.

It is no surprise that it has cues from the Crossfire, Chrysler’s sporty, two-passenger coupe which began as a show car but will actually be on sale in Ireland before the end of the year. "We had a very impressive car in the two-seater Crossfire, so what would be better than to provide a car that four people could enjoy?"

Howell is one of the very young new car designers, only two-and-a-half years out of the Center for Creative Studies at the College of Art and Design in Detroit. But he says he's been 'working on cars since I was six years old'. And perhaps that's what happens to kids who grow up in the shadow of Motor City USA.

The brief was to produce a car that would take the brand upmarket, but beyond that Howell and his team had a clean sheet of paper in style terms. "But whatever we did, we had to make it appeal to people who go in for expensive cars," he told IrishCar.Com. "We looked at a range of timeless designs in many fields - art deco, the Chrysler Building itself, riverboats, Chris-Craft speedboats, submarines, the P51 Mustang fighter plane, just good stuff from everywhere."

And what he and his colleagues came up with was a real impression of strength, a car that says unequivocally that 'I'm right up here and I'm the best, and I know it, so butt out of the way'. Rear fog lamps, centre high-mounted stop light and repeater lamps set into the side vents contribute unique elements to the Airflite design. The tail of the car is finished off with a bold chrome wing badge, and seven-spoke road wheels recapture the theme used on the Crossfire and Chrysler Pacifica, two of the brand’s latest products.

"If you're designing a car, you don't want it to be wallpaper that just fades into the background. You want it to stand out. So as we worked on it we'd bring it outside and ask ourselves 'is it there yet?', and generally it wasn't, so we'd make some changes and then bring it out again and ask the same question. Every time we went out, whatever we'd done had changed the car in a good way. It was a fun piece of art."

Howell keeps coming back to that 'A' word. Maybe it's something in car designers that has them very anxious to keep the things they love from just becoming another form of white goods. And though there are no plans known to actually market the Airflite, something may certainly develop from it.

"Yep, so far it's just a concept, but some of the stuff that we came up with will figure in the next generation of Chrysler cars."

There's no doubt that the Airflite - and the Crossfire too - are cars styled in the grand American tradition, even though the Chrysler company is now merged with Daimler. Howell hasn't been around long enough to have a hangover from the old days, and anyway he's pragmatic and positive about what the merger can do for people like him.

"It gives me a greater resource, a bigger shelf to take bits from," he says. "For instance, if a Chrysler supercharger doesn't fit under the hood we design, well it might be that AMG have one we can use. Though, for the Airflite, we used a Chrysler engine because that was the one which suited us best. we did shop around first, and if there'd been a more suitable one from Mercedes, well, we'd have had no difficulty using it."

Whatever, it was definitely going to have a real engine, wherever it was sourced. Because the Airflite is definitely no 'pushmobile'. Which also makes it possible that it will one day soon roll into a Chrysler dealer near you, as close as anything to what Greg Howell couldn't stop looking act, and talking about, at the Geneva show.

People are like that about their new babies ...