2008 SEMA - Sleepers and creepers
Given SEMA’s tendency towards the extreme, its refreshing to see two groups of concept vehicles here that buck the trend. Call them sleepers and creepers.
A sleeper is a car that is faster than its looks let on. Two notable manufacturer-tuned cars here this year illustrate this. Subaru brought a concept Forester XTi to the show; beneath the boxy styling beats the drivetrain of an Impreza STi. (Watch our Impreza STi video review.) Calm down the show-floor paintwork, and this seems like quite a good way to get your family to the slopes on time - once you put on winter tires.
It’s a bit hard to call any Dodge Challenger a sleeper, but given what lurks under the hood of the Challenger SRT10, that term may apply. Note the SRT10 designation – as in the 10-cylinder engine from the current Dodge Viper. This car is a favorite among CR’s auto test engineers here at SEMA. As Jen Stockburger put it, "It’s the best of both worlds. You get the Viper’s engine and you don’t burn your legs getting in and out." With Chrysler trying to find a buyer for the Viper line, maybe they should hold onto a few engines.
As for creepers: a lot of the four-wheel-drive trucks here seem to be emulating Bigfoot. (Not the hairy one.) They’re jacked way up in the air, have lots of chrome, and big power mods. There was even an aftermarket lifted 2009 Forester that almost looked almost menacing.
In that vein, I like the contrast of seeing bare-bones elemental off-roaders here. Two trucks here came to mind. Jeep showed their Wrangler "J8 Sarge," an open-back basic Wrangler with a turbodiesel four-cylinder from VM, the same company that supplied the diesel in the Liberty a few years back. Given Jeep’s heritage and the fact that even the $30,000 Wrangler four-door hardtop we tested wasn’t a paragon of refinement, this idea seems right.
The same goes for the Toyota Tacoma concept. Even the name is basic. This four-cylinder truck harkens back stylistically to the mid-80s. Seeing this off-white truck with vertical brown-gray stripes across the floor, I thought they had restored an old truck. Even the brown Recaro-labeled fabric on the seats (not to be confused with actual bolstered Recaro seats themselves) harkens back in time. But once you get up close and can put the size into scale, the largeness of the current Tacoma compared to the (much smaller) older trucks becomes more obvious. Mechanical upgrades were mostly limited to swapping in the axles and transfer case of the very capable FJ Cruiser.
This is one of the joys of SEMA for the enthusiast—the idea that there really does seem to be something for everyone.
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